Favorite Track: Starlight

This Piano album is 42 minutes of original music written for my 5th anniversary with my girlfriend, Emily. The project was made over about a year using a digital grand piano and Abelton 11 live. This project was an overall reworking of my entire piano writing process. My previous album was mainly written in parts that were combined digitally; so for this album I wanted to actively play them live and only do cleanup inside of my daw. this ended up forcing me to practice a lot more and really increased the complexity of what I was able to write because I had pushed myself to do something I hadn’t done before.

One thing that is fascinating about the project is a good portion of it was worked on when Emily and I were in different states, This distance led to some of the most emotionally expressive pieces I’ve ever written due to how much I missed her. This feeling of separation and longing is most obvious on track number 5 “When you’re gone”.

My favorite track of the project really surprised me, track number 6 “Starlight” this track was the last written for the album and was extremely difficult for me to write as I kept reworking it because I felt like it sounded strange, However when I showed a rough draft of the album to my family every person agreed that starlight was the best. it turns out it sounded strange to me because it was so different. I had found a new style of more controlled stylistic writing using everything I learned from working on the rest of the album. When I showed the final version to Emily she thought Spotify had changed the artist because she thought it was written by someone else. That was a fascinating moment for me because it taught me my biggest take away from this project, which is now that i have learned how to write more complex songs, I can than reduce and distill some of that complexity until I land on something that is unique and resonates without overwhelming.

Finally, The cover art is is a photo of her playing in autumn leaves When she 9. When I was looking for the cover art I wanted something that felt nostalgic and vintage to fit in with my previous release of snow day. I had asked her dad if he had any old photos of Emily playing in the leaves and when he showed me that photo I knew it was perfect.