When someone asked me if I was making an album, I laughed. I had shared a few raw songs, and she, who had just released a stellar album herself, heard them, she said she could hear it. It, as in, an album.

There was definitely a story that I was starting to sketch out, so why not? And here we are. So, thank you, Tara Trudel for asking if I was making an album, but also for encouraging me to explore parts of the playground I'd told myself was for the big kids. (If you have kids, you'll want to seek out Tara's album "Fractured: Fairy Tales Remixed" here on Bandcamp.)

Thank you also to Hugh Duncan for sharing your music with me and helping me get back into my music making brain. It'd been a long time.

As I mentioned, there's a story in these songs. There are themes there. There's resisting the inevitable, and then inevitably giving in to what is un-resistable. There are hellos and there are goodbyes. And holding on for dear life to what is dearly loved, and trusting enough to let go.

These songs were, for the most part, cultivated within a 10-month span, but the first seed was planted five years ago.

This collection of songs is offered in gratitude for Dad and Liz and Stacey.

***

Labor Day weekend 2022, I was up in Traverse City with my family. The aurora forecast was pretty good, so we drove out to a beach on Lake Michigan and stared at the sky at about 10 pm. We saw a faint green arc gradually develop. It stretched a bit above the horizon, looking like a lit underside of a cloud. I convinced myself was just light pollution. After staring at that green arc for half an hour, we left to go back to the place we were staying. But before giving up, we decided to give our search one last try and pulled into a parking lot next to a restaurant on Lake Leelanau. We wandered down to a dock and stared at that same static green arc. Suddenly, streaks shot up from the arc into the sky, and the show was on. It was wild and mesmerizing and chaotic. The streaks kept shifting, and although the colors were hard to detect with our eyes, they were there -- our phone camera lenses found brilliant greens, pinks, and purples; peaks and what seemed like light upon light and shadows within the light, creating untamed contours spilling subversively into the big dipper from the horizon, as if someone had said, "well, we're in full chaos mode now, so let's just turn off the gravity, too."

A Requiem of Cicadas ends with my imagining of what crossing the final threshold is like. When I imagine it, all I can see in my head is the Northern Lights in riotous beauty above Lake Leelanau.