One summer weekend in 2006, my small spiritual community went on a retreat to an apartment in San Francisco. As a major part of the time, each person had one or more pieces of art to present on the subject of her “deepest dream(s)”.

The idea was that something prepared in advance on that subject, then later presented and discussed, would provide an interesting, focused, and perhaps vulnerable manner of getting to know one another more intimately. When I started working on my own art a couple weeks prior, I found that having a deadline for the creative process actually made me quite fruitful, and I ended up having three songs and the start of a short story / novel to share.

I won’t talk about two of the songs, the novel, or what dreams they represented, at this moment. I did, however, want to share one song, an instrumental piece I composed in Logic with my keyboard. The composition took over many long nights, zoned out hammering keys, headphones pressing a wide canyon in the top of my skull.

Even all the way through the retreat the song had remained unnamed, but after having had some time to think on it, I ultimately decided to call it “The Wayfaring Aesthete Engages the Road in Conversation”. (Originally, it was supposed to be called “ReCreation”, but I didn’t want to inflict on it too great a connection with my weblog, and the storied nature of the final name is much more appropriate).

The dream of mine which corresponded to this particular work was that of creating/designing objects/experiences which faithfully and reliably transmit emotion. In a word, “evoking”. I long to evoke responses in others the way that good art evokes incredibly deep emotional responses in me. I treasure those experiences as gifts, and desire to give such gifts to others as well.

The image you can see while the song is playing is a screenshot of my Logic environment when creating the song. You can follow along with all the different tracks as you go along the timeline from left to right!