The song Unemployed has been with me for a long time, probably from sometime between 2000 and 2008. It first started up as a Norwegian song titled «Stemmen din» (Your voice) and was part of my Norwegian pop album «1001 Natt» that I was dreaming about making. When I eventually moved on and focused on an English album instead called «1001 Nights» it continued to be on the album track list. When I started to create better instrumental demos of many of the songs that I had collected in a project called «The Red Box – Demo Sketch Collection» the song got a new English title: Good 4 me. This title lasted for a long time but I struggled to write really good lyrics to it and I started to search for other topics that I could use for the song. When my music project started to get serious and I started on the Dreamwork project I finally ended up wanting to write about unemployment, a theme that I myself, and many other people around the world, can recognize. The song therefore changed title again and ended up as «Unemployed/Brighter future».
I wanted the song to have one negative part, Unemployed, and one positive part, Brighter future. Originally, these were two separate songs that were put together as one. The «Brighter Future» part originally comes from an older song called «Anything U want». My intention when putting the songs together was that I really wanted a kind of a bridge after the first part and added the «Anything U want» part to it, but instead of just having a short piece used for a bridge I decided to use the whole song so I got a long and different type of song.
Like all the other songs Unemployed was also supposed to be a straight forward pop song in the beginning. However, after some time I decided to go in a more electropop/electronic direction on the album and the original plan for this song also changed. As reference tracks for the song I therefore chose the song «I feel space» by Lindstrøm for the negative Unemployed part and the song «Lanzarote» by Lindstrøm & Todd Terje for the positive vibes in the Brighter future part.
The song was presented to the producer in his studio at Tou Lyd, Stavanger, on 11th June 2019. I received the instrumental track from the producer on 16th January 2020 and we recorded the vocals on 28th February. I received the finished studio version of the song on Wednesday 13th May 2020.