Sun Shone Blue EP is out! What a relief!
Part of me insists that it’s not a big deal. These songs were recorded in 2019 and avaialable in obscure corners of the internet without the thread of being called an EP to tie them together.
That thread feels important though, since we deal in the weaving of reality here. In the process of trying to create something with a theme and a coherent narrative, albiet from recycled pieces, a new story emerged. I discovered new purpose and feel more confident about where I am headed….the grave, yes, but before that!
I set off to recreate myself in 2011, and surrendered to the flow of life, at least to the extent that I was able to at the time.
After the earthquake, life pulled me like a magnet between Xiamen and Hong Kong and to some extent Chengdu and Dali. I planned to go to India and Germany and Thailand and Nepal and Portugal, but I knew it wasn’t time yet.
Each city had it’s lessons ready for me, lessons on letting go, on freedom and desire, acceptance and will, love and fear.
Every experience was a mirror that reflected light differently, allowing me to play with the shadows and illuminations to understand better what brought this “me” to each successive present moment.
There was so much to untangle, an ego to crucify and to allow to be resurrected, and I apologize for the biblical terminology but there is no better way to describe the process of rebirth, even an imperfect and incomplete rebirth.
I hope to be reborn many more times in this body, each time becoming a better vessel for love and fun and creation.
And before this gets any more esoteric let me get back to the songs.
Tracks 1, 3 and 5 were written in 2009-2012 and continued to evolve along with the person who wrote them, the “I” in I+Everything.
By 2015 they were completely different songs, and then certain beliefs and desires that I was still in the process of letting go of got in the way of their evolution and they ended up solidifying.
That was until 2019 when I came back to Tokyo to take on new challenges, and finally tried recording them myself which gaveme the time to experiment with them. Other beliefs and desires that needed to be let go prevented me from wanting to release them because they didn’t represent who i wanted to be at the time. But they represented who I was.
The next few years, my focus became healing, not only mentally and emotionally, but at the deepest levels of programming that manifested through all aspects of my life, including my physical health.
Finally this year I realized that the songs had become baggage in a sense. That’s not to say that I didn’t love them or that I should get rid of them, but I needed to learn to love and appreicate the “I” of 2009 and 2015 and 2019 who created them.
I found the common thread between all these versions of myself when I learned to accept all of them, and suddenly I no longer felt like I needed to prove anything. All I wanted was to pay tribute to my own story, and these songs (as they are) are a big part of that story.
I wanted to honor my own story because it is valuable, as is your story, and part of my purpose in this lifetime is to embody an appreciation for any and all things I can muster appreciation for, nothing being more important than the consciousness that is experiencing it all.
I am not the center of your universe (I most certainly should not be), but I will always, by nature, be the center of my universe. And so I present it to you in hopes that it can encourage you to honor yourself in the same way, through exploration and through creation.
I+Everything has always been an attempt to understand where the self ends and the reflection of the all begins. To the “scientific” mind that assumes consciousness arises from matter and not the other way around, it ends at the skin, but for the ever-seeking creating soul, the line is not so clear. There may be no line at all.
TLDR: I did it all for the lolz
Originally there was a concept for an album that would explore past traumas and attempt to untie each major knot, but that story ended up being told through seni-autobiographical fiction in “Confessions of the Damaged”.
And so all I wanted to was to punctuate the period of my life which was about shedding old skin and to start a new chapter which is about creating, building or transforming ideas into reality, defined by love rather than resistance. There will still be highs and lows, but love is the driving force now, rather than fear.
So yeah, I did it for the lolz.
You can stream Sun Shone Blue now on Spotify, Apple music, iTunes, and a bunch of other platforms. Music, lyrics, production and album art were created by “I” and influenced by “Everything”.
I’ll have more to say on each of the songs themselves, and lyrics will be up soon!
And for anyone who was wondering, the 0:52 seconds of silence at the end of the first track were totaly an artistic choice. Don’t you dare think otherwise 😝
And to purchase on Bandcamp
❤️