To the Dead

What this album/book means to me is a bit more personal than some of my previous projects. Whereas with the others, upon looking back, I sometimes feel as if I was showing off what I could do. With this one, however, it is much more of a presentation of me. Much of the music is instrumental, although I guess this description might suffice for someone who had never heard my music before. Perhaps the best description would be that it is a poetry album - instrumental, of course, but born from a place of poetry - in the sound and in the message. What would it mean to be dead? What would it mean to have lived the life I have lived? These were all questions I had begun to ask myself at a time when, what I felt to be my purpose in life - my music - had really begun to be fully fleshed out. No matter any of the accomplishments, however, nothing ever seemed to be enough In cold sweats, I would wake up at night with the sudden and dread realization crashing down upon me that death was inevitable, and it would reach me as well. I had always approached life with a suicidal recklessness that I liked to think of as bravado. The more comfortable I became with life, however, the more I began to realize that death would reach me on its own terms - never my own. As such, I became nervous and I realized the possible length of such a sentence. I wanted to make peace, and this is what eventually came of it. This book features poetry that is representative of my album To the Dead. I wrote this in hopes that some might be inspired by the journey I went on for this project, and how it helped me to embrace the fact that, one day, we will all die.