White Stag is out!

In the chaos of 10 other projects, and as the close of 2019 was fast approaching, I hit the brakes to survey all of the music I had written in 2019.

This period has been one of experimentation and discovery for me, expanding dramatically into modern sound design, orchestral sample libraries, orchestral composition techniques, better understanding synthesis, and so on.

It's been a year of frenzied learning and creation, but just in time for the new year and the new decade, I really wanted to get something out there. That ended up being this miniature, cinematic piece of music called White Stag.

After a year of learning and experimentation, it was a hugely rewarding feeling to get something out into the world. I feel that this sort of opened the floodgates for me. After bundling everything together and setting up the release on Distrokid, I felt a fresh page had turned and started working doubly hard on the other projects I have going. I want to chase the feeling!

A little back story

I wrote this piece after the reading C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to my daughter for the first time (she demanded a second reading immediately after we finished). I've always found this book so beautiful, and written with a profound love and reverence for childhood and children. In particular though, I was floored by the ending.

The actual fantasy and imagery of it the story is beautiful, but underneath it all there is such a melancholly. The children, grown into kings and queens of Narnia, find themselves at the lamp post, which they only distantly recognize, as if from a dream. Steeling themselves against a sense of foreboding, they bravely go forward only to find themselves once again children, in the spare room of the old house, with their whole lives ahead of them, and on the precipice of "growing up".

It's the overcoming of their fear and doubt I found so beautiful. I got the impression from it that Lewis was calling on his older readers to remember the courage of childhood, and at the same time encouraging his younger readers to be brave and hold on to themselves as they embark on life.