Here's a music video for "Fragments" - Track 9 from my new album "Going Somewhere":
Walker Percy once wrote in The Moviegoer, "Not for five minutes will I be distracted from the wonder." That’s pretty much the way I feel all the time: in awe of Creation and Infinity and very much unsure of what it all means (but grateful for the chance to be here to consider it at all). I wanted to try to capture this feeling in a song about the fundamentals of who we are and where we are going. The essential ideas I had were "connectedness" and "distance," and the paradox of how both concepts are fundamental to our being.
The lyrics were influenced by such thinkers as Frank Tipler, Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, Nick Bostrom, St. Augustine and Alan Watts, among others. Chalmers Davis came to me with a beautiful chord sequence and I came up with a melody and matched it to the lyrics. It was an honor to be able to co-write this with him. We recorded this in the beautiful-sounding Center for Performing Arts at St. Andrew's Episcopal School (my alma mater) in Ridgeland, Mississippi.
The video expands on this idea of distance and connectedness, and how they are really the same thing, whether on a cosmological, microscopic, or human scale. (harp content: the harmonica is a mix of 1st and 12th positions, using Seydel 1847s in the keys of C and G)
