Frontiers

It's interesting how things can gather meaning over time--over hundreds of years or maybe even just a few weeks.

A few weeks ago I released my Frontiers album. The original title was "Central Coast" (Central Coast meaning the east coast of Lake Michigan) but I didn't use it because it would have been too confusing with the central coast of California. 

A couple days ago I was listening to an interview with the poet David Whyte who was on the OnBeing podcast. He was talking about frontiers and it resonated with me. 

Very often when I work on a piece of music or a piece of art it takes a while for me to understand what its path is. Anyone that makes things from ideas realizes that a piece reveals its own intentions over time, or has to fit in with a group of objects that are finessed accordingly.

For Frontiers, I had about 40 pieces of music that I went through and tried to think about how it would work as an album. The sound that I imagined had instruments that would have existed in the 1970s and 1980s, just when synths were beginning to be used, so it uses mostly organs, electric pianos, and so on, and stylistically would represent all the style periods I went through over the decades.

There are various stages (or milestones using the path metaphor) where art accumulates meaning with the things that are happening in your life or in the world.

So it was the David Whyte interview where I realized what the album was representing conceptually.

He was talking about frontiers and nicely encapsulated the intrinsic meaning:

"...it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you...." 

So the music is the conversation that I engaged with at the frontier level. In retrospect that's what it's about. There might be other things in the future that I'll encounter that will make the album more meaningful to me and perhaps to someone else, and consequently more connections are made and milestones reached.

Frontiers and boundaries also create a sense of place. In some sense, this album is in the Music For Places series as "Music From Chicago" as me being a native Chicagoan, and my body of work as a whole has "Chicago" in it. I can't be taken out of it. So that's why there's blues stuff in it because I started with blues and R&B. (St. Louis is officially the gateway (frontier) to the West, but Chicago is as well).

What it meant in terms of music was the intention just to make the music at the roots level, and the stripping down of the instrumentation was instrumental in that. I wanted to get back to playing, rather than creating synthetic atmospheres with very little musical nutrition.

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You can learn more about Frontiers here.