Present Day, May 2026
The 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 the wreckage. The Orchard Sleeps required sitting with something that is not metaphor and that I do not know how to convert into hope without falsifying it.
I have watched the natural world change across five centuries. Not in the abstract sense of having read about it: in the direct sense of having been present in specific places at multiple points across that span and having observed the specific changes with my own attention. The orchards outside Florence. The forests of the Rhineland. The coastline of the Bay of Naples. The birds in every city I have lived in for long enough to know what they sounded like in the morning.
The changes I have witnessed are not subtle and they are not reversible on any timescale that is meaningful to a civilization organized around lifespans of seventy or eighty years. I am not reversing them on the timescale of my own existence, which is considerably longer. The silence is accumulating. The land is speaking less and less. When the land stops speaking entirely, the geometry accelerates past the point of intervention.
This is not metaphor. This is documentation. The grief in the song is the grief of a specific, direct, accumulated witnessing. May 22.