No Trace

My car was packed to the brim with belongings and the feeling of time travel set in as the seasons changed from late summer to early Autumn coasting further into the mountains. The sun feels lower with more jagged terrain; it disappears earlier too. Noise hangs in the air and reverberates through the surrounding valleys. Distant ghostly trains answer each other in diminishing multitudes. There’s a foreign quiet apprehension not quite like those that surface on the prairies.

Coming off a busy summer of café work, a feeling of stagnation set in when the running ceased. There was a new void in my perception of time. Time moves slowly when you can feel every moment, and quickly when you are thinking about the future. For a while, days felt simultaneously slow moment-to-moment, and blazingly fast while contemplating the lack of momentum. The period in between occupations often feels like this to me. The rub between trying to enjoy a hard-earned break and moment of growth with the need to make rent and continue your journey in a new direction inspires an anxiety in me.

In the basement of an Inn along Banff’s Cave Ave, I lived with a few French tourists and a salt-of-the-earth lady from Northern England for a couple of weeks. Aside from those applicable to the kitchen space, there was one rule—you must be quiet, as you live below the Inn guests. I spent my days soaking up my gift of time through reading, making orchestral arrangements of songs, going for long walks, and softly playing the guitar. I portioned a chunk of each day to look through real estate listings and job postings. Most read something like.. “Spacious Room Under Stairs In 14 person Home: 1000/month+Utilities” and “Make Up To 50k a Year, Set Your Own Schedule” for independent cleaners.

The freedom to immerse myself in a less rigid sense of time allowed me to shift gears into the philosophical mindset again, which often begets in me a contemplative musical experience as well. In this period I started my song Shadows (read it here) with a Tennyson quote fresh in my mind, as well as No Trace with my recent revisiting of time dilation and metaphysics.

It’s a song that came out pretty quickly, unlike most others. I had a few guitar ideas and started singing over them. Within two or three short writing sessions, I had the full song just in time to move from the basement suite. Over the next months, I was given the chance to perform it in Banff a few times before the series of moves landing me back in Lethbridge. 

By this stage it felt quite settled and I was ready to make an arrangement. It is an unassuming song, which gave me lots of room to play. I started with the origin: solo acoustic guitar. The chord changes suggested to me some woozy, clicky-keyed electric piano, which also acts as the bass in the song. Something about heavily compressing it made it feel more cozy and warm. That warmth suggested to me some ambience. The day I recorded the guitar, it happened to be lively and drizzly outside so I recorded a few rounds of uninterrupted ambience from my bedroom window. I’m not sure what it is, but something about the refreshing chill of rain awakens me. This sound of running water—weather the rain, a waterfall, or even a shower or sink in another room—inspires a state of ataraxia in me.

Around the precipitation and birdsong, the song evolves into something slightly more enveloping. A piano on the left initiates a friendly dialogue with the electric piano, distant reverberant pads swell with the changing dynamic of the song, additional voices emerge and vanish, emphasizing the thoughts of the singer. Percussion joins at the namesake lyric with rhythmic rubbing hands in stereo, as well as a patted loaf of homemade sourdough as a kick drum. The repetitive percussion helps to anchor the new section with the addition of a mellotron cello droning the key’s tonic, E, and creating a pleasant tension in the outro section; the sound to match the dissonance of the parting lyrics “when there’s no time to sit and take it in, you’re living in the past.”

Thank you for reading.

Listen to the song here.

Listen to the album here.

Looking back on Holiday Originals

Back in 2020 I set out to write an original Christmas song. The world felt new and scary and nobody quite knew what to make of the pandemic or could comprehend how it would change our lives at the beginning. The forecasted couple of years didn’t sound like a big deal at that time, coming out of a pretty okay spring and summer.

In the midst of a months-long stint recording the bulk of Sojourns in my bedroom, I felt an annual polar-opposite festivity overtake me. For a long time I spent months writing a song, and thus would start the festive tunes in June. It is a common occurrence for me to have Christmas music on the brain any given day of the year, but this time it felt different.

In the beginning, O, the Holidays are Near! was actually just a little prelude to Wintertime is Back; a minute-long retro intro of sorts. Thankfully, my good friend Drew suggested I develop it into its own song. 

Digging into that song concept brought out many of the things that made Christmas music so special to me over the years: inspiring imagery, coziness/warmth, references to the time, orchestral elements, cheerfulness, togetherness, etc. I added many layers to that recording that set the tone. I found some clinking dishes and indistinct conversation clips online and added those to three separate recordings of a crackling fire. Layering orchestra with a tack piano and a warbly, vintage guitar sound tied it all together. The last piece of the puzzle was to get that crispy, warm crooner vocal delivery that I had admired and tried to emulate my whole life. It will never be quite like my heroes Nat King Cole or Mel Tormé, but it did the trick on this song. Listen here.

Wintertime is Back! came about via a much more current approach. For a time I think that Christmas originals lent quite heavily on all of the aspects I relied on for O, the Holidays Are Near!, and began to sound pretty similar and lifeless. I turned to a genre that wasn’t in my wheelhouse, nor my experience of Christmas music to this point: funk. Vulfpeck had released Christmas in L.A. a few years prior and I was absolutely obsessed by it. It was a much more modern and specific take, which felt so fresh and joyful.

The message that I wanted to get across was exactly what Joel and I had been aiming to get across while doing covers throughout the years: to try to share the utter joy we feel with others, regardless of how and what others celebrate. I’ve realized over the years that it wasn’t Christmas that was so special to me, but the things about that time of year: settling in for the night, spending more time with friends and family, taking it a bit easier and giving others a break, reminding others that they are important to you, eating a little too much for a short period, showing affection through gifts, gestures, and time spent together, sleeping well/not sleeping well in the interest of having a good time, looking at your life and humankind in general a little differently.

The whole process of recording this song and video were so special to me, and I am really grateful to everyone who was involved. We recorded most of the extra layers in Joel and Randi Stretch’s basement: Omnichord, Dylan’s guitar, percussion, claps, bells, choir, group atmosphere. We also recorded the music video at their place. I did the storyboarding and directing and shooting (not to mention I sewed a sleeping cap) and convinced Joel to play an old curmudgeon who is accosted in his own home by a cheerful group of Lethbridge musicians. (You really need to see it to believe it - check it out here).

I think you can really hear the message in this song beyond the lyrics and I am really grateful that I found my way back to Lethbridge to spend some more time with these stinkers. I will sure be spending more time with them in this coming year. Happy Holidays, and best to you all (and expect a holiday cover ASAP).

Listen to the album here:

Spotify

Apple Music

YouTube

Bandcamp

Shadows

I’ve been listening to a lot of the Ram Dass Here and Now podcast over the past few months. I feel like things are a bit chaotic in the summer and it really kept me on the ground. Soaking in the sun in half lotus for hours on end certainly helped, too. They were moments where the intrusive thoughts about where I should be in my life stopped.

It harkens back to the summer that I was working maintenance in residence at the University here. I downloaded an obscene amount of Alan Watts lectures and would listen while I monotonously mended fifty-year-old furniture. I was in a hole that summer. Almost all of my friends had left for the summer to travel or tour. The person I was seeing went to Southeast Asia for a month and stopped responding to my messages. I was spending the majority of the picturesque days staring longingly outdoors from behind dusty panes framed with gritty old concrete. The work was so tedious that I started listening to audiobooks in a day as there would be no opportunity or reason to talk to my co-workers. I would listen through the thirty or forty so odd hours before starting over to soak in the parts I missed and relive those that I loved.

One part that struck me immediately was actually a quote that Alan had lifted from Tennyson. 

The hills are shadows and they flow from form to form, and nothing stands

They melt like mists the solid lands—like clouds they shape themselves and go.

It’s something that still haunts, but also settles my mind.

In the interest of love I moved to Banff three years later. For a month I lived in the basement of an Inn while trying to find a tolerable service job and a proper place to live. Something about being in Banff stirred many things in me and brought this quote back to the surface. For a long time much of my songwriting came from moments of insight collected, rearranged, and later compiled in the Notes app on my phone. In the first week I had written a full song (No Trace which is also on my album Sojourns) as well as the music for Shadows. The music sounded so pretty that it felt like I was going to wreck it no matter what I did, though it later occurred to me that these words would perhaps be the only fit. They seemed too profound for the first and second verse, and thus needed some supplementary material. 

I remember having visited the Royal Tyrell Museum the summer prior and being absolutely taken by the idea that a sea once ran through North America. The Niobraran (Bearpaw, Western Interior Seaway, etc.) sea ran through the centre of the continent from current Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico for a period of almost thirty-five million years. As with every visit to the Royal Tyrell, this information made me feel like I am part of something so much bigger. My problems seemed smaller and gratitude expanded.

Humans occupy such a small part of time and space. According to current models of evolution, our earliest ancestors emerged from the rich, vibrant ocean to find a new habitat. They risked everything. We have always been shifting and resettling; taking big leaps. Humans are transients on this planet. So much has happened independent of our species. It can be quite confronting to see the world as impermanent. Earth is our only home and changing our minds can be uncomfortable.

Finding the additional verse immediately preceding the one I had originally heard tied everything together in such a serendipitous way. I ended up using half my own lyrics and half Tennyson’s words, book-ending the song to extend the more-than-two-hundred-year-old text.

My first addition:

Moonlight scatters peaks across the rugged land

And shadows bloom

The very spirit of the earth shall will to stand

And be exhumed

From In Memoriam, Section 123

There rolls the deep where grew the tree

O earth, what changes hast thou (have you) seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea

The hills are shadows and they flow from form to form

And nothing stands

They melt like mists, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go

And my final addition:

We are but visitors, shifting through these transitory lands

With starry eyes and sturdy feet

Emerging from the deep

Listen to the song here.

Check out the lyric video here.

Listen to the album Sojourns here.

As always, thank you for reading.

Whispers

"A whisper is secret and privileged information. That is why we strain our ears to overhear it. It is a similar privilege to hear any delicate sound; most people never do.”

R. Murray Schafer - The Thinking Ear

Disengaging the noise of our thoughts, egos, society, etc. has been practiced across the world in numerous ways for at least as far back as records exist. Silence can be both soothing and aggravating, depending on your momentary, and deeper biological states. Facing a void can be uncomfortable, or even frightening if you aren’t prepared. Sometimes we aren’t ready for what is being communicated, but the universe whispers clues to those who cultivate a practice of listening.

Throughout the course of the year that I encountered this quote, I had to shed many habits and ways of thinking in my life in order to move on with my life (I openly refer to it as the worst year of my life so far). In the midst of everything, I got the privilege of conducting research in environmental sound recording, soundscape composition, sound-mapping, and to a degree, environmental noise level monitoring (which was funded by the Joyce and Ron Sakamoto Prize for Research and Development in Digital Audio Arts - you can listen to the compositions here). During this time I truly allowed myself to listen deeply and also revisit those recorded moments of deep listening. Being present and engaged in these breathtaking and uncomfortable moments is probably a big part of how I made it through that year. It brought me into the embrace of truths that can sometimes only be appreciated in surrendering to them. There aren’t words to fully express truths, but ways of pointing towards them. It’s the frequency and angle of gesture that makes something truly compelling and transcendent to me. 

The ring of peach and azure that frames our daily perception hangs low in the sky and peaks from behind the quaint condominiums of the subarctic suburb,

Coated with gold and red, the deciduous behemoths tower in static camaraderie,

The crisp autumn air seeps in through the upstairs window and whispers solemn melodies before sinking into the post-summer warmth of the floor in my bedroom.

Seasonal cycles unearth many emotions in me. The felt passage of a full year brings with it many memories, expectations, and newfound nuances to the world. Experiencing the same thing from a new vantage point fills me with a sense of nostalgia and often yearning. It brushes me against thoughts of mortality and reveals the rub between the daydream visions of life and my literal whereabouts. Words like the ones above often come to me in moments of clarity and hope after a lengthy struggle with my thoughts. It feels like standing at the cusp of a new life looking forward. There have been times where it felt like everything I was doing began to act in opposition of my goals and desires. No matter the energy, focus, or time I channeled toward something, the result fell short. I’ve found over the years that yielding to the forces of change and the flow of life is sometimes the only way to find the path again. It’s time like these I finally allow the quietude of life to set in and for answers to emerge. (Some call it wu wei). 

Regardless, Autumn is very confronting for a number of larger societal reasons, as well as physical/psychological ones. For many it brings a time of reflection and introspection. I think it is crucial to the arc or Sojourns for the same reasons that I feel Autumn is crucial to the cycles of nature and a balanced headspace. It was from these seasonal moments of realization through listening, quiet reflection, and yielding to flow like this that Whispers emerged.

Listen to the track here.

If you enjoy the track, I highly recommend listening to the full album as well. Find it here.

Gibbous

Part of this piece actually originated back in 2017 when I wrote the next song on the album, Solstice. The original release included a brief intro akin to the song that heavily inspired it, Old Pine by Ben Howard. I knew that for the ease of performing it and putting it on an album that I would need to drop the intro. It wasn’t until I started configuring the tracklist for Sojourns that I decided to rework it and add it back in to the album’s arc. I love listening to albums from front to back, and even more when they flow nicely into one another. I also love a bit of a musical jigsaw puzzle. Modulating from D major to F major is no big feat, but I wanted a nice bridge and a new feel between Gaia and Solstice.

A cozy piano juxtaposed against bustling London atmosphere felt strangely dream-like. Adding the sampled human voice and plucked instruments made it all feel very surreal. Meandering through slowly-resolving chords into the next song’s key-centre felt like a lift in the weather; like the clouds broke and I could see the moon rising over the mountains.

I have become quite fascinated by the moon and its relationship with the earth in the past few years. I had a minor in physics during my undergraduate degree, and studied astronomy and cosmology. Space has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. I have always been enthralled and consoled by nature as well. The more I focus on its individual parts, the more I appreciate it as a whole when I take a step back. Gibbous feels like a wider picture to me. It allows you to take a step back after the activistic defiance of Gaia and prepare you for the estival reverence of Solstice. 

The word gibbous emerged in Middle English from the Latin gibbosus, meaning hunched or hunch-backed. Waxing gibbous is a phase of the moon between first quarter and full moon in which the sun’s light covers more than half of the moon’s visible surface. Since the moon is (roughly) spherical, once past the half-lit point, an arc or hunch appears as the line between light and shadow. (Here’s a fun fact that we don’t have time for - the line that separates the illuminated and dark areas of the moon is called the terminator. WE DON’T HAVE TIME!). One can often see a waxing gibbous moon in the afternoon, shortly after moonrise, while it is ascending in the east as the sun descends in the west. The waxing gibbous is the second half of the moon’s journey between new and full. It feels fitting.

Listen to the track here.

If you enjoy the track, I highly recommend listening to the full album as well. Find it here.

Halcyon

As with Patience, Halcyon made its presence known as the year came to a close. It started with the initial low chords and the melodic line hovering over top, and quickly turned into something that sounds pretty atypical. There was a weight and dark sense of mystery to it unlike other pieces I knew. It felt very intense and spell-binding that night. I grappled for a long time with the words, which eventually began to slot into place as the following year took hold and perihelion threw different ideas and forces into orbit. 

Like with a number of songs on this album, its lyrics don’t contain the name of the song, but were derived from the first lyric—lost among the waves, drawn in by luna’s persuasion. I feel that the main message of the song is about connecting with the cosmos and basking in the vast expanse of the universe. In my life, those moments have been very impactful while isolated under the night sky. I find it inspiring and crushing, but deeply contextualizing; we are so small and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. What we experience imprints and leaves tangible meaning both individually and on a societal level, yet nothing is really that grave, cosmically. There is a freedom and permission in that. You are allowed to perceive everything as a member of the universe, in addition to the human vantage point to which we’re all bound (in fact, it is probably better for everyone if we all try to experience both). These messages come in waves for me, as with most things in life. There is strength to be found in focussing on them just as there is to be found in gazing up from them every so often. Finding a balance in those two viewpoints is a big part of the spiritual journey for me. To strong-arm a well known phrase (to see the forest through the trees), this song is about seeing the moon through the waves; ceasing our fumbling through them now and again to gaze into the source of them; seeing the bigger picture through the human condition.

The halcyon is a mythical bird of legend which is most commonly identified with the Kingfisher. It was believed by the ancient Greeks that the Halcyon bird made a floating nest in the Aegean Sea. They thought that during her nesting period, she had the ability to charm the winds and calm the waves. When the Halcyon was nesting around the winter solstice, fourteen days of calm weather were to be expected. These two weeks are generally thought to start on the fourteenth of December (coincidentally right around my birthday). Since then, the myth has entered the English vernacular and began to figuratively mean ‘calm days’ or act as a nostalgic recalling of the seemingly endless days of youth.

Everything stemmed from this vision of being on the open water at night bathed in the glow of the moon and stars. The arrival of these sentiments began to accrete the remainder of the song. A process that would not reach it’s current recording form until several years later. 

As Sojourns started to take shape as a concept and body of work, the threads grew stronger; songs echoed others in instrumentation and arrangement, themes grew together while finding their own identity, lyrics hearkened to one another. The ten pieces naturally formed a triumvirate, falling into three different spheres of influence: terra, luna, and stellæ; the first with earthy, scrappy, and sensual characteristics; the second as introspective, intimate, and serene; and the third with its contemplative, expansive, and transcendent weight. 

My singing bowl made an appearance in two songs: the first as an instrument of primarily harmonic content in Whispers which forms a pitch-manipulated choir, and the second in Halcyon, primarily as a pad or environment instrument. Looking back, this instrument probably spoke so strongly to me with these two songs because of what the singing bowl (and what it emulates—the ‘Om’ or ॐ) symbolize. In Hinduism, it is the  supreme essence—tuning into the wavelength of the universe’s fundamental vibration and resonance; aligning with the great resounding echo of existence. 

Unemployment in the first six months of the pandemic gave me time to explore, and play, and think. During this period I entertained and frustrated myself endlessly with outlandish ideas for the pieces. For reasons that escape me now, I had morse code on the brain one day and decided to try to incorporate it into a song. Halcyon seemed the most logical with it’s indie-tronica roots. Following in the footsteps of Radiohead and James Blake, I thought that the palate would lend most effortlessly to this song through synthesizers and drum samples. In the first half of the song, there is  a synth that introduces a radio-static sounding rhythm underneath the vocal stacks. 

- .... . / --. .-. . .- - / .-. . ... --- ..- -. -.. .. -. --. / . -.-. .... ---

the / great / resounding / echo

When the morse message returns later in the song it is dispersed between the high hat parts in the big chorus section. (I made a whole video about it - check it out here).

The final piece of the puzzle was how to end this. Another fruit of my experimentation was the somewhat angular, odd-meter arpeggios that felt like the perfect parallel to rising with, straddling, and gliding down a wave. The song continues drifting and churning slowly back in toward it’s foundations until settling back into low piano with fading singing bowl accompaniment. Settling and calming like the Aegean Sea in the presence of Halcyon.

Opening yourself to possibility and inhabiting the world of a piece like this can yield such serendipitous outcomes. As my good friend and favourite facilitator/guide on yoga once said: “allow yourself to accept the universe’s energy,” and I feel like I was able, years later in this moment, to do just as she asked. 

There is solace to be found in the tiny home and relative insignificance in this great resounding echo. Many secrets are held in her expansive mystery. It inspires and crushes all at once. We need only listen and learn if we want to find our place in it.

Listen to the track here.

Patience

This song began during the dark cozy winter evenings spent alone in my Banff studio apartment. I think the first iteration of the chord progression came on the night before my twenty-seventh birthday. It was a drone sitting on top of changing bass notes (check out my video about it here.) As with any riff or bit that I like, there is a tight, narrow trail of phone or Logic recordings leading back to the rough beginning. As with so many of my songs, there were a backlog of lyrics patiently waiting to be set to music, but a lack of evocative progressions through which to utilize them. The lyrics started to cascade after the chorus was lifted verbatim from a thought that came to me earlier that year:

We must shift our search from the absolute

The only grande, insoluble truth

Is presence and impermanence

I was visiting Lethbridge a fair bit and pretty quickly grew tired of listening to music for three hours each way. The slower pacing and deeper detail of spoken language made it all more grounding and enjoyable to me. I vividly remember the drives beneath riptide cloud banks scattered about with enchanting and fleeting spectrums of colour. The sun would meander down across the jagged line where the sky briefly touched the mountains and hills and one by one the stars would peak out of the spherical dusk-to-azure gradient. There are some moments in life that demand your attention; some where no effort is required to focus on what’s going on, and I found many within these drives.

I find myself prone to periods of contemplation and self-reflection during long travels. A few ideas from recent months had really been resonating with me and slowly began integrating into my worldview. The Tao of Physics had reignited my love of quantum mechanics and the cosmos while again presenting the incongruence between science’s search for quantifiability and the elusive, deeply mysterious, and often mystical qualities of existence. It was through the rub in trying to harmonize these seemingly diametrically-opposed views that I landed on the line that became the chorus.

Having saturated my drives with TED talks (which, I think rightfully, paint our current situation in a catastrophic light), and watched a video on changing ocean currents (check it out here) I had water and conquest on the brain. I thought a lot about how within the past few hundred years many colonizers were guided through this turbulent and unforgiving medium to various parts of the world by these forces and it is through the same pillaging actions and attitudes that these same forces are now weakening and stalling out today. I am always reminded of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech when such attitudes and actions are viewed or rationalized as positive, entrepreneurial, or even as an act of necessity:

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Why the track is called Patience still eludes me a bit. I think it just feels right. Some say it is a virtue, others find peace and centring in it, but at the end of the day I like how the word sounds and the sense of nobility it carries. Humans may conquer and synthesize and idolize as a means of feeling purpose and understanding towards their home, but all things return to stasis when given time. The earth will endure whether or not we find a way to make our situation sustainable. It is a matter of our ability to find harmony with the natural order that will determine the viability of humankind. 

It is the same beings capable of horror and destruction that are capable of compassion and devotion to bettering the world. If we can see past all of the bullshit once in a while there is a peace and direction to be found within it.

Listen to the track here.

Solstice

Solstice is the oldest song on this album, both in spirit and time of completion. This song started to take shape in my mind the first time I heard Ben Howard’s song Old Pine back in 2011. To this day it is still one of my favourite songs ever. It encapsulates a grand sense of harmony and adventure; the zen you get from being around friends in nature. 

In the late winter of 2017 I had just returned from a New Zealand summer and felt so invigorated and inspired. I had recently gone through big fallings out with once dear friends, and had departed my university atmosphere after finishing my undergraduate degree. It was a big time of opportunity and change. Life felt like it could go in any direction. The sense of possibility was so exciting. I think it is reflected well in my writing about the song from its demo release:

“The pinnacle of summer; a culminating or turning point. A metaphor for boundless opportunity. The reminder of good things to come and acknowledgement of things gone amiss. A time to start unnerving and exciting steps toward the newest version of yourself.

Solstice epitomizes my impressions of summer: adventure, exploration, liberation, reinvention, rediscovery, reconnection, and revitalization. I hope you enjoy in listening as much as I have in creating.”

I had been playing around with open guitar tunings, inspired by Ben Howard but also a more recently discovered John Butler song, Ocean. Find it here. I think that open guitar tuning sound that both these songs have really evokes a freeness you can’t achieve with standard tuning on a guitar. It also immediately sounds folky on an acoustic guitar. For anyone who doesn’t know, open tuning your guitar means that you change the tunings of the strings from their standard tuning so that they ring in open intervals (fifths, fourths, and octaves) with the rest of the strings on the guitar. This creates a consonant, harmonious ringing, more akin to the harmonic series in my opinion, and also a shimmery chorus effect due to the slightly out-of-phase ringing between strings. Changing the tuning of a guitar also changes the finger positions for chords, which has the added advantage of removing a player from the theory of the fretboard to which they can become accustomed, and potentially uninspired by. The rules change and you can invent something fresh.

After playing around with chording and riffs in a new tuning, I came up with the skeleton of Solstice in a week or so. One evening after work I decided that I was really feeling it and needed some lyrics for the song. I scribbled down some ideas that felt inspired and, within the matter of about an hour, arranged most of them into a full song.

I recorded, mixed, and released a version of it by myself a few weeks later. It didn’t sound very good. I ended up taking it down from my bandcamp page later, but still felt I wasn’t finished with it. That summer I did a little tour and when we played it, it felt like it wasn’t very exciting for the rest of the band. Maybe it was just a song that could only fully exist in my head. 

It wasn’t until 2020, when we were rehearsing the record’s rhythm tracks, that Max and the Minimums actually played it as a group. I finally had confidence in the track again. Chris immediately knew what to play on drums to get the energy I so badly wanted. Richard heard those hollow chords and beefed them up with a juicy bass tone. Joel worked his usual magic, imbuing the track with ambience, a beautiful rock-like force, and soaring slide guitar lines. Solstice finally felt complete. I am so happy to finally share the finished product with you.

Listen to the track here.

The Thousand Year Journey

In the dead of winter in 2015 and in the depths of a concrete submarine slowly sliding down the side of a coulee, I was in a windowless room trying to find a video to score for a class project. The way that my life changed that day was kind of funny, actually. I suppose it isn’t necessarily easy, or even possible, to sense when you’re on the verge of a big change in your life. This seemed like an unlikely spot to find much inspiration in any case. 

I was on Vimeo searching for something interesting and art-y when I stumbled into the Staff Picks section. Nothing really caught my eye until I saw a wide-brim-fedora-laden backpacker, backlit by the setting sun cresting a mountain range. The title read The Thousand Year Journey: Oregon to Patagonia. That sounded pretty interesting to me.

Jedidiah Jenkins quit a job he loved in his thirties to go on a bicycle trip from Oregon to the southern tip of Argentina. Being in my early twenties and somehow even more unsure of my future than I am today, I was really taken by this concept. I think we sort of dream of running away and travelling the world, especially when things get murky. If you are anything like me, things felt pretty murky at that age. It was around the time that the idea of living a minimalist lifestyle became widely popular, and I was feeling a pull to drop everything and go off the grid for a while. As the video went on, he moved into his justification:

“The routine is the enemy of time. It makes it fly by. When you’re a kid, everything is astonishing; everything is new, and so your brain is awake and turned on. So every passing second your brain is learning something new; learning how the world works. And as you get older and your brain has figured out the patterns of how the world works… once your brain establishes a routine… the alertness goes away; the fascination with how the world works. 

I want to be aware of every day that I’m alive. I want to make it to eighty-five and be exhausted because I have been alive and awake every single day. And I think that’s the duty of being an adult. When you’re a kid everything is new, so you don’t have to work for it; you’re just astonished by it. Once you’re an adult, that’s a choice; you choose adventure for your own life. 

But it’s not about the bike, it’s about getting out of your routine, and that could look like anything. And that’s why I’m doing this bike trip. I don’t want my days to control me. I want to control my days. I want to choose a mind and a soul that’s wide awake. In a sense it turns your hundred years on this planet into a thousand.”

Wow. 

I continued watching videos to find something for my project, but that seed stuck in my mind. It’s funny how sometimes when you’re confronted with something life-changing it can take a little while to fully register. I remember speaking to a friend a few days later who lived a comparatively nomadic lifestyle and tried to remember the name of the video. Thankfully there is a watch history on my Vimeo account and I could once again locate the video, otherwise I may have forgotten it, and perhaps would have never written this song.

Throughout the coming years I kept returning to it. Whenever my creative friends were in a slump or somebody was feeling stuck, I recommended it to them. To me, his thoughts have this very healing quality to them. Something very powerful happens when it feels like somebody else has felt like us and knows what we’re going through. Even without resolve it can be so inspiring. I think what made this even more inspiring is the fact that Jed came from a situation that would be considered conventionally fulfilling and sought to gain nothing more than the opportunity to learn from upheaving his life like this. Heck, this guy probably gave up more than I would simply in order to change the way he thinks. I got to experience a taste of that epiphany in a dingy and dim-lit classroom. For that I am forever grateful.

In the summer of 2018, after graduating university, working, and many months of travelling, I returned to the idea. This time I pursued the feeling it gave me. I wanted to reflect the message that had done me so well. Over the course of a few weeks I put this piece together, later to present it to my band the Minimums where it would take the shape of what it is today. I hope you enjoy listening. It has been a great journey getting it here.

Find the song here.

And the original video here.

Get Jed’s book about the trip here.

Sempervirens

Sempervirens is a song about ancestry. It grew during a time of heavy moving in my life, both physically and emotionally. From the Latin semper (always) and virens (flourishing, green), it conjures images of the ceaseless line that interweaves and connects all humans. 

Most of my songs start with the culmination of new experiences, exposure to new knowledge, or quick growth, and Sempervirens was no exception. Not long after I had uprooted my life and moved to Banff to be near my partner, my outlook changed quite a lot. For the first time, really ever, I was an incommutable distance from my family and friends with no reputation precluding me. During that time I was actively seeking connection and legitimacy in my being. Moving to a place largely populated by young folks from around the world completely changed the regular setting within which I was operating. Being that so many people in Banff are on two-year visas, it was also a bit tricky to really forge relationships with those who have lived there more permanently, as getting close to people who would inevitably be moving on had wearied most over the years.

From the first days of living in Banff I was writing music. During the first two weeks I was living in the basement of an Inn looking for a job and a house, I wrote two songs (quite a feat for me). Being in such an otherworldly national park was certainly influential, but I think what really triggered it was such a big pivot in my life. In moments of big change I find myself evaluating the way I view and approach the world. Thoughts can be worn into beliefs that can become habits without good reason, so shedding what isn’t helpful to oneself in these moments can be a very liberating experience. Frightening and dizzying, but liberating. Thankfully this uncertainty was fruitful both in state of mind and songwriting inspiration.

As the weeks rolled on, I travelled back and forth to Lethbridge to see family and friends and to get away from the constant traffic in Banff. I have a hard time listening to music in the car for the entirety of road trips, so I took to podcasts, or just nothing at all, for a long while. On these trips I listened to many enlightening things including Song Exploder, where artists talk about the creation of one of their songs; Broken Record, where Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell speak with artists about their journey and body of work; the TED Interview, where TED lecturers dig further into their knowledge on a subject; and, of course, TED Talks. During one early weekend drive to Lethbridge I heard something that has changed the way I view my place in the world and history: The Power to Think Ahead in A Reckless Age by Bina Venkataraman. So began gears turning. (Listen to it here).

I have mentioned my love of Yuval Noah Harari’s take on the world in posts prior. During my time in Banff I read his second book, Homo Deus, about the future of humankind from which this telling quote was lifted:

“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”

It was Harari’s first two books that gave me a jumping off point and what really brought Venkataraman’s TED talk into context for me.

The last piece that fell into place was through another unlikely source: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In a dreamy state of half-attention around the hour and thirty minute mark, I caught a quote while Scottie and Madeleine are in a forest in California. Madeleine makes a reference to the trees:

Scottie: What are you thinking about?

Madeleine: Of all the people who were born and died while the trees were living.

Scottie: Their true name is Sequoia Sempervirens—always green, ever living.

At this point, everything came together. 

Within a few days I had created a demo and was playing the song live for the first time (here is a recording of the first performance at Beatnik Salon in Banff).

After the pandemic hit, it gained wider context. With so much time to think and start new activities, priorities shifted, and all of this influenced the way that this song was recorded for the full release. People on both sides of my family started tracing our ancestry, some of which stretched back for the better part of a millennium. This song has been on a journey since it’s conceptualization, and I am so excited to finally share it with you on February 25th. Pre-save here.

Vestiges: For a Friend

I debated whether I wanted to share this piece, as it was about somebody who was very dear to me at the time of its conception, who I have since had a falling out with. Someone with whom I was great friends and then began an unhealthy relationship. I learned a lot about myself during that time, which is why it is important to me. I believed for a while that it was the best song I had written, and still enjoy it, but think that far more of its potential lies in its teaching ability (as a reminder for me, if nothing else). As my relationship with the piece changed, I realised how potent the message was and how important it is to improve your future self through your previous downfalls, rather than try to forget them. I am a better person today because I was a less-balanced person then. 

At the core of this song, there is a universal message. And that is that we all have our moments of doubt and weakness, and that we are sometimes filled with blind hope and disillusion, but we persevere and our trials ultimately shape the next step in our lives. We get more brittle, or we become more malleable. I decided (mostly) to become the latter.

In addition to this, it speaks to the power of human interaction and the way that our lives are shaped by the people with which we choose to surround ourselves. The original bit that I wrote in the winter of 2016 goes..

Within another you can leave a piece of yourself.
Your projections endure tenfold when carried in the hearts of others.

 Your disposition, mannerisms, sense of humour, and mood have a direct effect on not only the behaviour of others, but the trajectory of the lives of others.

There is no true isolation in humankind.
You are the product of your own existence multiplied by the characteristics of the most influential people [with which] you choose to surround yourself.
Be kind to yourself.
Be kind to others; change lives for the better.

The chronology of the lyrics is quite important. From this simple realisation sprouts nuance, as a growing relationship does, and the picture is slowly filled. The clear progression is from a place of epiphany and admiration to a blind hope and foresight that was obviously bleak, but not perceived as such until later. I feel often that my lyrics end up holding a different meaning than intended or comprehended initially. I find this so mysterious and magical. It’s like the thoughts and lyrics are coming from my unconscious and there is a layer beyond my accessible thoughts that is far more informed and insightful. Perhaps the “genius” to which Elizabeth Gilbert alludes in her Ted Talk. 

What grips me about this abnormally long song (so long, in fact, that as I registered the piece on SOCAN it asked if I was certain that it wasn’t two songs..) is the musical arc and how it ties in with the lyrics. It is so heavily based around the riff and tonality that enters after the intro (starting at about 0:33 seconds). This embellished G chord is “home,” so to speak. In fact, it is held for about the first minute once it comes in. This is me; this is where I feel at home or comfortable – these are my thoughts and feelings that don’t stray far from my normal thinking. From here my thoughts, both musical and lyrical, drift off into more colourful insights on the world. There is a sense of adventure and uncertainty about them which is paralleled in the chord progressions and melodies. As the song progresses they get longer, but also return to the “home” place for longer once they’ve departed (and get more adventurous and creative within that home space). 

As the song moves into the second half, it takes a moment to breathe and comes back with a similar tonality, but altered progression, that stays less attached to the feeling of home. There is an implied coming-away-from-myself; a feeling of self-doubt and restlessness. On top of this, there is also a tempo change of about four beats per minute. It feels like rushing into something or letting the momentum of one decision carry you into other decisions. It feels less certain to me. The progressions get less adventurous and more rooted around the stable-unstable relationship within the key, hinting at the growing lack of underlying conviction in the lyrics. They cycle with little change back and forth, like the cyclical thinking that takes place when you are trying to convince yourself of something. As the music and lyrics get more boisterous and compete with the growing dynamic of the music, they also get more self-convincing until a climax is reached. Unraveling from this mania comes a feeling of exhaustion. A return to a tired and tender repetition of the initial theme that was once so filled with life and hope. A different side to the sense of home feels less comfortable and worn out. The range in which the vocals sit also lowers, showing its need to rest.

The initial sentiment is repeated, swapping the order, and altering the resulting ideas. A sense of finality is reached in the quiet conclusion and descending vocal line (landing on the reclusive low tonic note of home key) though the attempted convincing continues even as it concludes.

I learned a lot about hope through this song. Hope is what keeps us going. But, as with any outlook, one that is missing a sense is uninformed. Blind hope is uninformed hope. Ignoring some elements of your progress to focus on an outcome is unhealthy. Opening yourself to authentic experience is the best way of learning, in my humble opinion – as well as others…

“The arts is more about opening yourself up to possibility. Possibility links to hope. We all need hope.” – Yo Yo Ma, The Music of Strangers

-Max

Vestiges: Freedom

We are all a product of our planet. It is not without harm to ourselves that we can bring harm to the forces, ecosystems, and organisms that brought us to be. It is only through coalescence and our collective knowledge and capabilities that we can achieve fulfillment, and continue our legacy as the adaptive, intelligent being of humankind.

“In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.” – Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot Speech

“”It is wrong to live under constraint; but no man is constrained to live under constraint.” Of course not. On all sides lie short and simple paths to freedom…” – Marcus Aurelius

Freedom was written as many of my songs are. Piece by piece, strung together with intent over the course of a few weeks musically, and devised lyrically through a culmination of thought over an extended period of time. It’s hard to say exactly when it started or when it will end. One of the first ideas was an unassuming one, however. Scribbled down in a moment of euphoria; one of acknowledgement.

I am a son of the forest,
I am a daughter to the sea,
I am a cousin to the wind,
And no stranger to running free.

As is often the case, I will be inspired musically but not lyrically. For this song, I had many ideas floating around in my head, but no base from which to start. Over the years I have compiled a sizeable backlog of thoughts, phrases, poetry, and prose in the notes on my phone. So, to get me into the groove, I dug up this gem. Pre-dating the songs by many months (probably even a year or more) it fit well with the new ideas with which I was becoming familiar. At the beginning of my university education I had attended a few yoga classes with a new friend. I still speak passionately about my newfound appreciation for the power of a single breath that I found those days. The basis of life, yet so unconscious. Part of the autonomic nervous system — involuntary and essential, untaught but learned. I remember feeling like I had moved to another plain of existence after the first class. Everything was so clear and timeless. Our automatic push and pull for subsistence could be intentional and filled with appreciation and understanding. Every second of our life can be filled with eternity. What a revelation!

My practice weakened and strengthened in cycles as I went on, but the seed had been planted. Whenever stress or circumstance got the best of me, I could always return to this principle. Breathing in – I am a part of the entire universe, breathing out – the entire universe is a part of me. I started to see things differently. I was a part of nature, not above it. On this journey through a new sort of consciousness I encountered a number of ideologies including buddhism. More ideas and world-views were introduced through books and lectures of people like Alan Watts. I downloaded dozens of hours of lectures covering topics from the nature of humankind to eastern philosophy. The shading of these bigger pictures I was encountering began to be filled and my curiosity expanded.

The culminating point for the lyrical content began half a year before the song was written, when I first watched a film called Planetary. I do highly recommend this commentary on the world and our nature. It is presented through alternating interviews of astronauts, explorers, sociologists, zen monks, tribe leaders, and more, while interlaced with stunning visuals of our planet. It asks and discusses arguably the most important questions concerning the world today (though don’t ask the current US President or Albertan Premier, who seem to be convinced that climate change and the global ecological crisis aren’t big problems). I borrowed and drew inspiration from a number of the speakers throughout. One phrase that really stuck with me was “We are not on the earth, we are of the earth”. When did we convince ourselves that we are so important? I realised that a large part of our problem originated with how we frame our world and how it contrasts with the way we frame our effects on the greater dimensions of our worldly sphere.

Take, for example, our supply of fresh water. Whether or not we like it, there are certain things that we currently can’t filter from water effectively on a large scale (caffeine and hormones being two notable examples – and actually we pump so much estrogen into our waste water that it is turning huge numbers of biologically male Sturgeon to females). Our everyday, seemingly innocent actions have tangible, far-reaching consequences, and return to us in varying ways. Each move has an effect, no matter how small it seems. The way through which we tell ourselves about the world can be deeply flawed, often without our knowing. The narratives that control our trajectories and dispositions have been shaped, and not necessarily by the hands of logic and evidence.

The stories to which we subscribe to mould our lives are incredibly important. Without them there would be a lot of misdirection and confusion. We needed large, overarching, directed, stories to get us to this point in an expanding global existence, and still do. The problem is that our global consciousness and conscience has not yet caught up to our global economy (though it is beginning to, and has with some – check out this short bit by Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens). The rejection of these narratives is not the answer, however (the results of said rejection are those who believe that the earth is flat, or that “chem trails” exist, for example). What we need to do is let go. In letting go, we are not denying or confirming, but acknowledging without clinging to. It is a stepping-back from the situation without completely removing oneself. It is an attempt to see clearly by limiting attachment. It is a conscious action of affirmation toward the existence of something without necessarily confirming it. Put eloquently by Alan Watts…

“If you breathe in and hold it, you lose your breath. But if you breathe out it comes back to you. So the principle here is: if you want life, don’t cling to it; let go.”

We can be aware of the way that things affect our lives without lashing out against them, or starting a violent revolution to change them. Change comes from within. Change comes slowly. Change comes from opening the eyes of others. Change comes from letting go. Change comes from liberating others; it comes from wishing freedom upon others and actively pursuing that equality.

As Thomas R. Flynn said in a summary of a lecture of Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre…

“If we are to pursue freedom in the concrete rather than merely dream of it in the abstract, we must address the alienated situation of others. We cannot be free until they too have been liberated.”

I leave you with the chorus of my song “Freedom” and would love if you’d listen and watch the video. Until next time…

Let go of all the narratives
Let go of all the formalities
Only then, you will know freedom

-Max

Vestiges: Lost

Lost is a frustration with the status quo, a yearning for the untapped possibilities of our being, and a message about how to proceed if we wish to unlock our potential and live a fulfilled life both individually, and as earth-bound, symbiotic beings.

How are we to become the solution to our downfalls? The answer lies within ourselves.

Lost started in the basement of a house I rented in my fourth year of university. I lived on Nebraska Road on the west side of Lethbridge with two of my best friends and fellow Digital Audio Arts students. During this year I had completed and consolidated the music theory and music history courses that I had recently taken covering Western Romantic-era through to Contemporary music. Though “Lost” never strays far from the diatonicism of less groundbreaking and adventurous classical-era or pop music, the inspiration to move toward a more colourful musical and rhythmic palette had begun. Two of the major pop-world musical influences that inspired this song were Australian singer-songwriter and heavenly vocalist Matt Corby, who had become somewhat of a hero to me by that time, as well as a sort of electronica-pop-jazz-groove band from Winnipeg called Royal Canoe who were consistently dishing up a funky, and often dark (but listenable), off-kilter rhythmically-intricate, musically-informed, super-band texture in their songs. The influence may not be as obvious to everyone, but this was my little take on those two huge writers. The lyrical concepts emerged from my growing appetite for reading, philosophy, politics, and refining personal outlook. Around this period in my life, I had come to an important realisation about my place in the world. Delving into literature and more qualitative, nuanced knowledge, I brushed up against some uncomfortable truths about the world and problematic flaws in thinking that were commonplace in my life. It was from authors like Camus and Nietzsche that the confrontation began, but, through their work, I developed a sort of optimistic realism about the trials we face and the melioristic solutions that can counteract them.

This year especially, I began my shift from a place of complacency. The looming reality of climate change weighed heavy on my consciousness. Of the bounty our earth provides and beauty it holds, how could we soil that in our own self (and collective) interest? For things that mean nothing. How accountable are we to each other? This was a deeply troubling realisation to me. It was as if our comforting, and often completely unnecessary, extravagances had become the defining feature of our consciousness. Our idea of freedom and the “American Dream” had become our own undoing. Our feeling of necessity when it comes to things like having an abundance of personal space, transportation, clothing, constant temperature control, pre-made, packaged, and imported goods, ad infinitum.. when we begin to look under the rug we see that our existence and our being has become heavily tied to our ego, or the ideas we have of ourselves and what/who we are. Does the world have room for seven-and-a-half billion (and ever-growing) egos of this size? 

I encourage you to take an eco-footprint quiz online to see how many earths it would take to sustain your lifestyle. Since taking one again recently it has been my goal to get below one, as unfortunately mine was above that. It’s important that it is below one because, if we hope to continue human life on this earth, we need to over-adjust our way of life to compensate for others’ lack of ability, access to resources, and mobility. From our vastly privileged position in the first world, we have to adjust to meet the needs our global ecosystem. I hope this encourages you to look into helpful ways of operating that are actually beneficial to our planet and society. (HERE are a few I found! – HERE are a few bad habits that are bad for the environment as well )

Meeting the minimum requirements is no longer an option. The legacy of humankind has always been carried on the often-tormented shoulders of those who see through the wrong in which they are imbued and make the right decisions despite the hardships. As Bill Nye once put it “To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people’s trash.”

More to come soon,

-Max

Vestiges: Overture

The overture as a piece of music has long felt a powerful story-telling mechanism to me. Before you hear a note of the first piece, you are imbued with fragments of the whole. The unfolding work breathes in unison and begins to unfold as a cohesive skeleton with no necessary regard for chronology. The inter-relations of all of the ideas flood the mind and blur the lines between the conceptualizations of the separated pieces. 

As with the vast majority of overtures from the classical paradigm, this was written after all of the others in the work (I had completed recording demos of all of my other songs as well). I really wanted it to set the mood. As is immediately evident, some of the notable themes and modalities surface quite early on and shuffle in and out throughout the piece just in time for the final key change into “Lost.” Beyond this there are a few other points of interest, however. 

As some will have recognized from listening to “For a Friend,” there is a nod at Sergei Rachmaninov’s second movement of his second piano concerto. As a means of referring to this again without directly referencing the line used in “For a Friend,” I included the unmistakable opening lines (from the first movement) just a minute or so into the piece. Some will recognize them as the pounding Orthodox bells which rang out each day in Moscow – where Sergei had studied in the Royal Conservatory – and would for years throughout Russian music. This was one of the first pieces of classical music to have an irreversibly profound impact on me. I was familiarised with the inspiring story of the piece and lent the score by a friend. Something that would ultimately lead to my impending study of, and fascination with, the orchestration and scores of other great composers such as Beethoven, Debussy, Stravinsky, etc. This theme appears adjacent to the theme from “For a Friend,” because of it’s strong ties to it.

Conceptually, Overture sets the pace of the rest of the album. The seed is sown from the first line and grows and shifts through it’s entirety, guiding the listener through the dynamic changes of texture and musical themes and preparing them for the landscape of the EP. 

I hope you will enjoy listening for the elements of Lost, Freedom, and For a Friend among the flurry of other musical ideas contained within “Overture.“

Vestiges

A trace; visible evidence of something that is no longer present.

Vestiges is a rite of passage: an echo of our collective wisdom, a tribute to our fore-family, and an acknowledgement of the inseparable confluence. Born of youthful epiphanies and wielding a sophic nonchalance, Vestiges is a revealing look into the lasting power and influence of our personal and collective histories.

This EP is a collection of songs about an important time in my existence during which I made several profound realizations which altered my outlook and trajectory. Words of wisdom seep in from the likes of the ancients all the way up to personal friends, both current and past. It is woven with exploratory (and at times, jarring) harmonic and rhythmic turns to illustrate the sometimes disorienting epiphanies or cycles which life offers, and hints at the growing repertoire of musical appreciation and interest in existential philosophy developed during that period.

The concept for the album art was devised by Kasia Sosnowski, who hinged the focal point of her work on the first lines from “For a Friend.” — I leave a part of myself with you, and you do you so with me; a seed from  which our lives will grow  - grow in new directions we would otherwise never know. In this phrase and others lies the heart of Vestiges.

In each interaction I truly believe that we leave a piece of ourselves with each other. In each friendship we leave and acquire a mannerism, a way of saying something, or a lens through which to view the world. We are the collective brushstrokes of our loves ones, our influences, and the people with which we surround ourselves. These are the indelible marks of which I am speaking. These are the indelible Vestiges we impress upon the world that endure throughout the centuries, across languages, and over spans of thousands of kilometers.

_______________________________

During my trip to Europe in the winter of 2017/2018, I got the chance to catch up on some music, movies, and reading that I hadn’t allowed myself time for previously. Among the music was the album Seas of Dawn by The New Weather Machine – a startlingly beautiful and powerful alternative/americana/rock album from a fellow Lethbridge dweller. Upon listening to Red River on the bus ride to Prague (and every free moment past that point) I decided that I needed to investigate further. Having seen Jon around, been in similar circles, under the same supervising professor, and at the university at the same time (I also witnessed his moving David Bowie cover night headliner show to honour his memory) I vaguely knew Jon and was somewhat familiar with his work. It wasn’t until listening to this self-produced and recorded album that I became incredibly intimidated by him (in mostly a good way, I’d say).

After releasing a new EP and then being away from my instruments and the ability to sing loudly for almost two months, I was ready to start a new project again. I had sat on these four songs for quite a while, having completed the last of the four over a year prior and the first over two and a half years before that. Having been so moved by Seas of Dawn (and having done my research and discovered that Jon has a recording studio in Lethbridge) I decided to talk to him about the possibility of recording together, even at the risk of sounding like the total fangirl that I had become. We met at a coffee shop and shared our philosophy of music, sound, and composition and he seemed interested in working together. It was a project that I was ready to spend some time on and execute properly, which worked well with his busiest-person-I’ve-ever-met schedule. Starting February of 2018, we began demoing and tracking and after a number of set-backs including a broken hand and several months of hiatus, we finished the tracking/mixing in early May of this year. The rest is history, so they say.

I am ever-hopeful that you find a meaningful way to relate to my music, as I feel that is the most powerful outcome of art. I also hope that you enjoy hearing about the journey. More to come soon.

Stay well – Max.