In February 2017, I wrote and recorded a song in my tiny Brooklyn apartment during February Album Writing Month. For years it sat in the vault like a time capsule waiting to be unearthed. Now nearly a decade later, it's finally coming to light.
While the official release on all streaming platforms is set for November 1st, as a special surprise for you, “Tesseract” is out early today on Bandcamp! You can listen to it and grab your copy right now.
The song was originally inspired by Baku, a figure from Japanese folklore said to devour bad dreams. My maternal grandmother was from Japan, and I've always carried that story with me. There's something beautiful about the idea that our nightmares could be transformed rather than simply endured. During periods when sleep eluded me, I found comfort in imagining something wandering through the night, quietly carrying those fears away.
Living with insomnia changes your relationship with time. Hours stretch and fold in on themselves. Reality begins to feel slightly altered. Dreams seep into waking life, and waking life can start to feel dreamlike. Sometimes, after a long bout of sleeplessness, the world becomes impossibly clear, almost too sharp, as though every detail has been illuminated.
That's why I eventually renamed the song Tesseract. The new title reflects the song's shifting sense of time, and the liminal space where dreams, memory, and waking life begin to overlap.
The refrain, "I am constantly ablaze," is a promise to keep my inner fire burning despite the challenges of living with a sleep disorder. To burn brightly, even when moving through those strange spaces between dreams and waking.
This song has traveled through time with me, and I am so thrilled to share it with you early.
