Wherever You Go

It wasn’t until Friday morning, some 35 years after writing my first song and scarcely eight hours prior to the first on-stage performance of my new album, Constellations, that it occurred to me that songwriting is (for me, anyway) pure alchemy. 

What begins in and is typically an expression of sadness and isolation, becomes, with time and telling, something altogether transformed.

Take Constellations fourth single and arguably its thesis statement, Wherever You Go.

The song was born last July, just a few weeks after leaving my job at Facebook, and, with it, my identity as a New Yorker, and a Big Time, Corporate Tech & Media Executive. I was unmoored, free to wander the quiet, leafy streets of Wilmington. 

With the dull rush of wind through the summer leaves, and distant rumble of the Brandywine River, it felt as if the prior twenty-five years were an apparition, a long, bad dream.

Over time, I began to pathologize less, and accept more.The “bad dream” became a “long dream.” And, having spent dozens of hours stargazing in my new backyard, the “backseat of a car” became a “backyard full of stars.”

Onstage Friday night, Wherever You Go, our finale, unspooled like a gentle epiphany at the end of a heroe’s quest. The band leaned into the crescendo, repeating the musical motif like a mantra, building and building into a great, collective smile and sigh.

There we were, together, altogether transformed.