The Magic Lantern

There are moments in life for which we cannot prepare. Nothing about the foreknowledge of our frailties equips us for the finality of loss or the screaming, bloody magnitude of a new life’s first gulping breaths. Reacting in all our messy humanity to the shock of a world made new, in each case we confront a profound dislocation that upends fragile certainties. This ‘tabula rasa’ offers a mirror in which to truly see ourselves, however fleetingly, as naked feeling things, mundane and magnificent, each a universe to himself. Pattern seekers at heart, we quickly reconfigure these new realities, projecting a sense of order on events. But we are changed. We cannot unlearn the truth of own mortality or the fragility of a life contingent. Scarred with knowledge, we press on in love, the twisting threads of a helix in a genome tracing an arc that reaches forward and backward. My fifth album 'To Everything A Season', was written in the months following my daughters birth and my fathers death six weeks later. In their brief meeting in a dementia nursing home, two ends of the circle of life touched, closing a loop I feared would be forever yawning. But in that cathartic moment, I felt another loop open and was shaken. I saw myself in my father, and my daughter in me and I felt joy and grief in overlapping waves, beautiful and complicated, which continue to ripple outward. These songs are my attempt to make sense of this incredible time. J x