The Poems of “Shades of Living Light”
When I was composing Shades of Living Light, poetry was always at the forefront of my mind.
Shocking, I know.
There’s always been a synesthetic association between language and music that exists in my head, and many of the songs on SoLL were directly inspired by poems that I was reading or writing during that time. When it came time to wrap up work on the music portion of the album and turn my attention to multimedia aspects, I already had a few poems written that would gradually be woodshed into the final versions that exist in the album’s digital booklet today (“Falling Into Ourselves” and “Komorebi,” for two). I knew that I wanted the poetry to tell a story much like the music already was, but I also wanted to make sure that the poems told a similar but markedly different story than the one I had in my head when I was writing the music for the album. It would have been redundant to tell the story of “the consciousness” that I allude to in The Garden Statuary’s publication of “Falling Into Ourselves”—the album already tells that story. I wanted to tell a new story; a story about the listener, a story about experiences that are universal and yet incredibly personal, a story about acknowledging that change will always be a part of our lives.
In doing so, I listened to the final master bounce of the album on repeat while I wrote and edited the poems that ended up making it into the collection. Actively listening as I wrote allowed me to travel to metaphorical writing environments that I had never been to before, much as I hope actively listening to the music of the album will allow other listeners to travel to places they’ve never been, be it creative, reflective, or purely aesthetic.
I encourage you to listen to the music of SoLL while reading the poems on the linked page. Not only do I believe that there is a remarkably interesting interplay between music and poetry, especially on this project (what, I’m not allowed to toot my own horn sometimes?), but reading-while-listening was always the primary way I imagined an audience member listening to this project for the first, second, or hundredth time. There’s something to a poem on the page, and there’s something to juxtaposing it with a poem in the air, even if what is in the air isn’t really what you might immediately call a poem.
Challenge your definitions, and enjoy the poetry of Shades of Living Light.
