Spark

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”

- Albert Schweitzer

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The Wayfarer

Wayfarer, the only way is your footsteps,
there is no other.

Wayfarer, there is no way,
you make the way as you go.

As you go you make the way
and stopping to look behind,
you see the path that your feet will never travel again.

Wayfarer, there is no way -
only foam trails in the sea.

- Antonio Machado

After last month's adventures with We Can Go Within, I decided to recharge for a week and then started work on The Wayfarer. It's a little different than my more recent projects, but is simple and sweet. No drums or rolling bass line, just a piano and a few other melodic layers.

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Special Credits go to: Parnowkloth who did the Underwater Sound in the second half of the song. Also, the whale sounds were posted by Our Media on Archive.org and you can listen to the original sample here. Both Archive.org and Soundsnap use a Creative Commons License for all of their sounds.

We Can Go Within

“We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.”
- Alan Chadwick

Several weeks ago, I had a night of intense dreams. In one of them, I was on a moonlit forest path surrounded by cascading voices. The melody they were singing was this one. I couldn't decipher the words with the exception of, "We can go within". After I woke up, I retraced the notes on my piano and then recorded it. It was still pretty early, so I went back to sleep. But that was what started this project.

The melodic layers went down pretty quick. I found an old 56k modem sample courtesy of Freesound and gave the intro the mood of a radio transmission. To further this even more, when I recorded the vocals ran them through a series of filters to give an the old AM effect. My wonderful husband Elim provided his beautiful baritone to the chorus while I did spoken word. The vocals took longer to record than the actual song, but the results were worth it. For one, this is first time I've been able to combine both elements into a single project.

My hope is after several more tracks, I can bring in guest vocalists. I'd continue building the lyrics and melody on my own, but having vocals adds a whole new dimension to the music.

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Special credits go to: Vedas for recording the sounds of an old 56k modem at the beginning of the song. Click here to listen to the original sample.