In February 2015 my musical activity was at an all time low. I sat in the empty house alone just after sunset. In the storage room, I found an old guitar of mine left behind from the move. It was a house where my wife and children had lived happily for 6 years. I had a studio/ practice space in the garage. Hours and hours of musical frienship was shared there. So many memories came flodding back. Just because that chapter of my life had passed, could I discard all that it meant to me? A few clumsy strums later on the red guitar and I audibly sang. I grabbed my pocket recorder and the song came out almost wholesale. The finished version, produced with Branon Hancock and John Drury, 6 years after that (!), didn’t change much in structure from that winsome moment at 853 Cyrus street, in the empty house. Ironically, when I had first moved to Valpo, the house next to us was empty and I wrote a tribute to it in a verse of “Take Off Your iPod” – how an empty house longs to be filled with new light. Now the house I had abandoned was the empty one, and it too begged for new light.

Is your life in a different place? Are there people and places you have left or lost – this is for you…