What are the most important parts of a journey? What are the events that shape our memory or impressions of a moment in time? We often times try to capture our lives in photographs, write little synopsis and create narratives that highlight our “main character energy.” Is life really like a movie, a reel, a meme, or a photo? Is life really like the glamorized, polished, and curated accounts we like to portray of ourselves? Of course it isn’t; none of us are naive enough to truly believe that our own lives are composed of only the photogenic portions of what we like to share with others. If our lives aren’t like that, than why would we chase the curated fantasy of someone else’s narrative?
Life is composed of many more subtle moments. The pause between web meetings where it’s just you, a cup of coffee and your thoughts; lying in bed in the last moments before sleep; walking across campus between classes; sitting at a red light, watching the light change. These are the moments that many people forget about, but compose so much of our lives. These are the places where the lines between our thoughts and our experiences blur.
This is the premise behind my first full length record “Watching The Light Change.” Past, present, future, inside, outside, thought, action, emotion, all existing simultaneously, with no clear demarcation between them, simply because life is a continuity. Mind, body, spirit, joined and inseparable. Take one out and you can’t have the others.
The songs included on the album were written across large swaths of time. The oldest going all the way back to 2003 when I began writing my first songs, the youngest only going back a year or two. Over twenty years of life existing in the same space; a continuum just like you and me. I had walked away from my music career for a number of years, but as my life had changed with age and experience, I knew I still wanted to share something with the world, not because I wanted or expected something in return, but because that is what artists do: we make observations, internalize them, and then tell other people about what we see, feel, and experience. It’s an innate trait of an artist to share and create spaces for collective experiences. So these songs were selected as a good place for me to start the sharing process. An overview of twenty years of a life that wasn’t waiting to happen, but one that was already being lived in the quiet moments between all of the events that are much louder, easier to photograph, and are easier stories to tell. These are the stories of those quiet places, the lives we live watching the light change.
