Introduction

In motioning meadows and shadows of sunlit stone rooms, from one historical sequence of events to imprecisions, moonlight through tree branches, the horse and rider plod tacitly round the bend, passing ruins not yet ruinous, amalgams not yet amalgamous, moments in time fleeting, parsing, not yet determined, etc.; future to-once-have-beens. Worlds not yet discovered. A cat sleeping in the sun. The Milky Way. The fields viewed from the castle. Reflection in the pond of the glint from a sword. A fish caught in the hourglass. And on, one travels the land, through sighs unheard, the steady clip-clop, sun overhead, keys fastened securely to one’s belt, positing the future, extant and hitherto, night arrives, cool and calm and carefree.

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The version of “The Dark Ages” that was ultimately released in 2014 was my third attempt to create the album. In August of 2013 I began work on some new songs and soon planned a three-albums-in-one album based on the idea of the three orders of society of the Middle Ages in Europe: "those who work, those who fight, and those who pray" (peasants, nobility, and clergy, respectively). Each song from one album would relate to the respective song on the other two albums, both in the instrumentation and musical themes used and, presumably, lyrically—in other words, song one on each album would use the same electronic instruments and contain similar musical phrasing; song two on each would then share similarities; etc. (I say “presumably” for the lyrics because I’m not sure how much these were fleshed out, but I think the idea for lyrical similarities across the songs would have been something that would have been necessary for me). I’m not sure how long I worked on this idea—perhaps a month or so—but it must have exhausted me because I abandoned it.

Wanting to revisit the material I had created over the summer, the second version of the album was begun in November of 2013. It was ultimately to be just one fairly short, six-song album, containing songs with a general lyrical sense of themes and imagery of the Middle Ages. For some songs I used musical themes that I’d created in the first version of the album, but I also wrote some new songs. I seem to have worked off and on on these songs for a few months, and by May of 2014 I had completed what I considered a finished album, but upon listening to it again before releasing it, I was so unhappy with the quality of the mix that I again abandoned the project, again exhausted. Two songs from this second version of the album would make it to the final version (“The Stars’ Bough” and “A Moat”), while other new material created in Novemeber 2013 would appear in future albums: briefly in “Americana” and, more significantly, in “Wend Unknown”.

In August of 2014 I somewhat unexpectedly wrote and recorded two new songs: “Odd Home” and “Narrative Appear in the Sand”. These songs must have lyrically reminded me of my two attempts at “The Dark Ages”, and I decided to stitch together a small album that touched upon the themes I had been exploring. As mentioned above, “The Stars’ Bough” and “A Moat” came from the second version of the album; “Key Skin Robe” was recorded during my sessions for “Caeser”; “Moonbeam” comes from my original noodlings after first discovering GarageBand in June of 2008. It’s as if these old songs had just been waiting to find each other. The introduction above was written for this final version of the album.