Pieces is a personal trilogy of new music created in the aftermath of the tragic 2017 Sonoma County Wildfires that destroyed so much and represents improvisation not only musically, but in practice. We lost our home and everything we owned that night, but the fire unlocked something in me, and I found myself compelled to create like never before. When everything’s gone, you have nothing left to lose. And the fact that we had nearly died in the fire made the next few months feel like a precious gift. A second chance to create again. A second chance to live.

Music poured out of me, but rather than trying to painstakingly recreate all of the songs I had lost, I decided to experiment instead. With donated instruments and a new laptop, I focused on retrieving snippets of songs I had emailed to friends and family over the last 15+ years, and subsequently reimagined the songs on the album. Chopping fragments up and sampling them, adding second movements with a different feel from the original, turning unintentional “mistakes” into intentional effects. It was all exciting, gratifying, and therapeutic, and a completely different method of composing than I had developed for my debut album, Final Beginning.

In less than a year after the fires I had written enough new material for three albums, and the idea of releasing them as a trilogy was born. Impossible was created first, raw and in the moment, and is steeped in the healing force of just being alive and able to write. Drift represents the subsequent period of wanting to be cocooned within movement that was rhythmic and comforting. A yearning for what was. And finally, Essential is about newness and discovery, and about moving forward with authenticity, love, risk, grief, and gratitude into a new world.

Channeling all of the pain and sorrow, joy, and gratitude into this music has been an incredible process. One that opens the conversation musically about love and loss and the healing qualities of low frequencies, rhythmic patterns, and swirling melodies sought out by the heart, for the heart to heal.