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July 12, 2002 :: Earthbound, and loss
The listening public usually has no idea of the time between conception and release when it comes to CDs. So, just to let you know, by this time last year all but three songs on Earthbound were done. It seems so remote to me now: how I felt at that time, what were the emotions and thoughts that went into my choices for this collection.
Anyone acquainted with my earlier CD, Aria 2, will remember the stark and scary performance that Steve Barton gives on Leiermann: the penultimate track.
Steve had been a good friend, a colleague, someone I saw very regularly for 12 years. Starting in August of 2000, he had a series of medical problems that ultimately culminated in his death in July of last year, right around now actually. He was 47.
His passing, and the unspoken but impending sense that it was going to happen, informed everything I felt, even if much of it was unconscious. When he died, I suddenly realized that I had been to some degree waiting for it, anticipating it. The lyric to Nevermore is addressed directly to him, a farewell, although in its silence an unsatisfactory one.
But the sensation of loss, or of waiting for loss, formed much of the the substance of my emotional life for those months, and many of the songs on the CD are tinged with it.
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