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.