I wrote this while driving a big camper van, moving to Seattle from Bellingham, WA, in the summer of 2011. I had a little digital recorder with me at the time—I originally bought that wee recorder for voice lessons I was taking at Western Washington University—hung onto it for a few years, recording hundreds of tidbits of my own verse and sound. There is something about hours-long travel—perhaps it is the experience of observing a moving landscape—the patterns and images rolling by, evolving over long periods of time—somehow affording one more ability to summoning comparisons to and reflection on experiences—be they past or future—the rhythm of highway driving in tempo with the imagination—parts of the mind traveling great distances while the body does the same. . .

This song stems from a memory—a memory of a feeling—a feeling, colored pale amber, flowing through a hazey filter of far-off memory—walking back through time like walking through curtains of light, like yellowed pages which crumble upon one's touch and dissipate like ash—a song honoring a certain feeling almost surfacing through sifted memories—honoring its golden fogs carrying 'round with it like a million motes of dust the entire spectrum of emotion, but wherein bits of melancholy, sentiment, and acceptance catch the light, turning slowly in the air, metallic fuzz—a song murmuring select sounds of ephemeral sediment—of what was an idyllic yet lonely childhood. This song is only one sound out of thousands from such a place.


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There exists a breed of songs stemming from this place of processing from whence and what I've come. Currently, I feel done needing to figure out whatever I'm working through here with this one. Though the motivating need wanes, I hope I sort through and share more of this kind of song—songs reaching to recall another lifetime, songs honoring the complexity and importance of any child's life, striving to follow one's path backward through emotional memory, tracing roots and hoping to name them in order to better understand the present path, process, and growth. When I let my mind wander on such journeys back in time, it always comes to rest on visions of the landscape—as if the origin of my spirit is in the cycle of the earth. I don't know what it means, but that is where the visions end and begin. . .

What am I, Who am I. . . questions I doubt any human escapes—leading to Where did I come from, eventually evolving into What are We, and Where can We take each other. . . like songs I hear and write today, in April 2016—but I know nothing now, never have, and probably never will. And I assume I shall continue to feel the need, from time to time, to stop to reassess the path I've been on, and reflect on the steps of the journey.

Perhaps most artists are simply striving to catch Truth in a mirror, for oneself and for anyone who cares to look. Truth—as if it lives on some kind invisible spectrum we all feel and we can only show to one another through a mirror we make—the spectrum of truth, revealed only in the mirror of art. . .