Three Days: On Choosing to Speak

Three Days: On Choosing to Speak

Present Day, May 2026In three days the testimony becomes public. I want to say something about what it means to choose to speak after choosing silence for a very long time.The silence was not passive. I was not absent from the world during the centuries of it. I was...
The Orchard Sleeps

The Orchard Sleeps

Present Day, May 2026The Orchard Sleeps is the hardest song I have written in a very long time. Harder than Black Sun Rising, which required precision and restraint but not grief. Harder than Children of the Ember, which required finding the genuine warmth underneath...
Diagnosis, Not Doom

Diagnosis, Not Doom

Present Day, April 2026Some people who have heard Black Sun Rising have described it as pessimistic. I want to address this directly because I think the characterization misses something important about what the song is doing and what the album is doing.Pessimism is a...
The Ember Is Not Nothing

The Ember Is Not Nothing

Various, consolidatedI want to say something about survival, because the album is not only about collapse and I do not want the record of my thinking in this period to suggest that I believe collapse is the whole story.I have survived plagues. Multiple ones, at...
Why Now: The Coordinates

Why Now: The Coordinates

Present Day, April 2026People ask why I am speaking now. The question deserves a direct answer.I broke my silence because I recognized the coordinates. Not in a mystical sense: in the specific sense that I have watched, from various distances, the progression of a...