before what we call "the modern age"

so, a couple weeks ago i created this new blog and announced that i am working on a brand new album (named the same as the blog).

i should elaborate and clarify.

in the true and traditional sense of the words, what i am creating is neither new nor an album.

i conceived of the idea for Had We Met In Another Life about a year ago, near the end of 2008, and that is when i started writing and recording the songs that will comprise this song cycle.

at the time, i was coming out of the tail end of a two year post-traumatic depression that i spiralled into after my uncle's death. i had already written an ep in his honour (old habits die hard), and it had been quite a cathartic experience for me.

the notion came to me that i should create a somewhat less-depressing masterpiece in honour of my uncle, perhaps something with an almost fantasy/sci-fi bent. thus was born Had We Met In Another Life.

what was the idea behind the title? well, i don't have theistic views or much spirituality, so death is a difficult thing to fathom and accept and not be fearful of. so to me, the concept of knowing or meeting someone in another life is a purely fictitious / speculative / fantastical idea; no place in the realm of reality. but therein lies the inherent fun. fiction storytelling is one of the things i do well in my music. i thought of all the people in my life whom i love and care about, and wondered "what if...?"

what if we could travel through time, or exist temporally non-linear? what if there are parallel universes or alternate realities, and our co-existences and interactions are ever-so-slightly different in those realities than in the one we know? what if our lives are a causal loop that we keep repeating like a tape reel rewound? is it always the same? are there subtle variation? or huge differences? questions like this have been the cornerstone of great fictitious myths, legends, and tales since the dawn of time. i wanted to explore the idea with a sequence of songs.

excited by this new concept album idea, i began writing and recording new material at an almost frantic pace. in a couple of months i had sketched out the basics of five new songs.

and then sometime in january of this year, i hit the proverbial brick wall; the musical writer's block. it wasn't that i didn't feel creative or couldn't write songs. all the creative juices were still flowing, but i felt like my style was stagnating. i wanted to progress beyond the sound of my previous body of work, and not be bound by the same genres, production value, and aesthetic that i had stuck to for so many years (i think this feeling was partly due to my xmas 2008 acquisition of a midi keyboard; a wonderfully valuable tool in my musical arsenal).

i effectively shelved Had We Met In Another Life, in favour of an exciting new project, Incarnations: the compliment before the original; the answer before the question. Incarnations was meant to be the sister album that was never really an album. written and recorded quickly, singularly, and released track-by-track (instead of all at once), exclusively on the internet, it was everything a traditional album was not. it allowed me to break out of my shell, and create a lot of compositions that were very different and challenging, and extremely fulfilling to produce. i truly think that writing and producing Incarnations changed the way i approach music, and perhaps even made me a better, more accomplished composer.

hence why i have chosen now to return to Had We Met In Another Life, and release it not as a traditional album, but rather in the same fashion as Incarnations (if a little more slow and measured, and perhaps slightly less ambitious).

i have started remixing the original five tracks, and laid out a rough tracklist with three more tracks, for a total of eight new songs. this is, of course, less than the twenty Incarnations (two more still to come before the end of the year), but the songs will be longer and more involved, hopefully more lush and orchestral without getting too busy.

like i did with Incarnations, i will release one track at a time, approximately one every month or month and a half. i hope to make a couple of videos for this song cycle too.

when the Had We Met In Another Life / Incarnations project is finally complete, i think i would like to cut a CD of Had We Met... with a bonus zipped up mp3 version of Incarnations on the CD, so i can distribute the two "albums" together, as they are meant to be.

in all likelihood, the first track to be released for the Had We Met... song cycle will be "For The Last Time"; a rollicking, waltzy, bittersweet ballad about love lost to death. watch for it to appear here in january 2010...