✨🎸🎶 Here You Finally Go: The Album That Took 20 Years
On aliens, computers, synthesizers, death, love, psychedelics, dinosaurs, guitars...
I’m SO relieved to finally fulfill the promise I first made in 2010, hinting at “my next full-length opus of acoustic adventure and eschatological angel jazz.”
Because I’m sending this to labels, it will be a while yet before I make it public — but I want my inner circle to enjoy first access. So here you are!
Below the paywall line you will find links to eleven richly textured new tracks AND the videos. While I produce for “five dried grams in silent darkness” listening, this concept album focuses on interfacing with the Mystery as it appears in “others” — so I wanted to include a generative element, because my read on AI art is that we’ve mechanized the dream state. I find this immensely fascinating. Watching this album’s AI music videos did something really strange and wonderful to me, like robots read my mind and added a whole extra layer of synaesthetic meaning, deepening the emotional impact. Not entirely unlike when Turquoise Sound covered my song “When The Orbit Curtain Falls,” which finally appears on this LP in its full trippy splendor.
Anyway, I hope that you enjoy this music! My deepest thanks to all of my supporters for your patience and encouragement. It feels SO good to finally decant this with you.
(At both private links you’ll have the option to leave comments, and I would be very grateful to hear what you think! I’ve never been a rockstar and I’ll probably never be one and still cherish 1:1 connections with my listeners.)
A Note To Listeners:
This album is the consummation of over twenty years of writing, playing, and recording music as a spiritual practice — a showcase for everything I have ever learned as a multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter and producer since I first picked up the guitar in high school.
It is also a chronicle of the deep questions I have lived and discoveries I've made while journeying across three continents on tour and through the distant reaches of psychedelic hyperspace, while leaving and returning to and leaving academia again, wrecking myself in turbulent long-distance love, beta-testing radical new creative technologies, and finding myself as a father.
It is my secret garden of uncompromising artistry and a fossil of the contemplative process of creation as this took its shape one jewel-encrusted track after another.
This particular bouquet has roots in UFO sightings in 2006 and 2007, a trampoline at Burning Man in 2008, and years of late-night tinkering. These songs were all polished on tours in two hemispheres, in some cases performed hundreds of times without ever getting a proper studio version. Life never slowed down and I couldn't find or make the time to let the molten creativity congeal until I found myself responsible for children — at which point full-time work and the pandemic made it even harder.
Three of my greatest inspirations — Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith, and Michael Hedges — all left behind unfinished masterworks when they died, and I vowed to everyone that I would finally complete this monster. It took seven years of stolen isolation and a superhuman allocation of lost sleep.
But even though I didn't know what shape it all would take for quite some time, I always knew the theme and motivation...
My next major studio effort would have to continue and resolve an inquiry that started with my 2006 album Get Used To Being Everything, my 2008 EP Double-Edged Sword, and my 2009 single The Cyclist/Throwing Sparks — exploring the co-evolution of humans and technology, the tension between yearning for transcendence and the embrace of very real constraints, and the paradoxical teachings of my visionary experiences. I wanted to create a work that spoke to human life at the intersection of colliding infinities, that grappled with the peril and the promise of contemporary life — that found and spoke from both a childlike wonder and a hard-earned soulfulness and strove for a reconciliation of the animal and angel, the made and born, the lost and found.
In 2010 I read The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein and fell in love with his idea of The Age of Separation (civilization, characterized by humanity's alienation from nature and divinity and one another) and The Age of Reunion (the coming era in which we've reclaimed a sense of place amidst a cosmic order and have healed ourselves from the illusion of our otherness). This next album would have to synthesize the expansive urge to transcend and include it all with a story of the fall from oneness into multiplicity and limitation. This story took its form in the tale of a human life from conception to death and the pilgrimage through an accelerating world that lies between.
These are, each in its own way, all love songs. They're about the nonduality of confusion and clarity, loneliness and togetherness, yearning and satisfaction, the simple and the complex, the past and future, the familiar and the foreign, the other and the self. They are an ode to seeking and to finding, to the rich soil of folk music I've inherited and the glimmering potential of revolutionary creative tools just starting to appear around and through us. They are about the glory of coming home to ourselves and to each other, of learning who we are and where we belong. In that sense, this is about apocalypse — but one world's end makes room for more worlds to begin, and so these anthems, ballads, and inventions are dedicated to becoming and the endless forms most beautiful produced by constant recreation.
Thank you for pausing to take this in and for your help with my ongoing efforts to make music with real smarts AND heart.
In Love & Gratitude,
Michael
🎧👁️ Here you finally go…
If you are involved in music business in any way and like this and want to help this succeed, please do not hesitate to speak with me.
✨💗✨