A new track and AI music video drops every Wednesday from 2/14 to 4/24 here and on YouTube:
bit.ly/theageofreunion

And of course on Spotify:
spoti.fi/49AQr1S

This album is the consummation of over twenty years of writing, playing, and recording music as a spiritual practice — a showcase for everything I have ever learned as a multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter and producer since I first picked up the guitar in high school. It is also a chronicle of the deep questions I have lived and discoveries I've made while journeying across three continents on tour and through the distant reaches of psychedelic hyperspace, while leaving and returning to and leaving academia again, wrecking myself in turbulent long-distance love, beta-testing radical new creative technologies, and finding myself as a father. It is my secret garden of uncompromising artistry and a fossil of the contemplative process of creation as this took its shape one jewel-encrusted track after another.

This particular bouquet has roots in UFO sightings in 2006 and 2007, a trampoline at Burning Man in 2008, and years of late-night tinkering. These songs were all polished on tours in two hemispheres, in some cases performed hundreds of times without ever getting a proper studio version. Life never slowed down and I couldn't find or make the time to let the molten creativity congeal until I found myself responsible for children — at which point full-time work and the pandemic made it even harder. Three of my greatest inspirations — Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith, and Michael Hedges — all left behind unfinished masterworks when they died, and I vowed to everyone that I would finally complete this monster. It took seven years of stolen isolation and a superhuman allocation of lost sleep.

But even though I didn't know what shape it all would take for quite some time, I always knew the theme and motivation. My next major studio effort would have to continue and resolve an inquiry that started with my 2006 album Get Used To Being Everything (1), my 2008 EP Double-Edged Sword (2), and my 2009 single The Cyclist/Throwing Sparks — exploring the co-evolution of humans and technology, the tension between yearning for transcendence and the embrace of very real constraints, and the paradoxical teachings of my visionary experiences. I wanted to create a work that spoke to human life at the intersection of colliding infinities, that grappled with the peril and the promise of contemporary life — that found and spoke from both a childlike wonder and a hard-earned soulfulness and strove for a reconciliation of the animal and angel, the made and born, the lost and found.

In 2010 I read The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein and fell in love with his idea of The Age of Separation (civilization, characterized by humanity's alienation from nature and divinity and one another) and The Age of Reunion (the coming era in which we've reclaimed a sense of place amidst a cosmic order and have healed ourselves from the illusion of our otherness). This next album would have to synthesize the expansive urge to transcend and include it all with a story of the fall from oneness into multiplicity and limitation. This story took its form in the tale of a human life from conception to death and the pilgrimage through an accelerating world that lies between.

These are, each in its own way, all love songs. They're about the nonduality of confusion and clarity, loneliness and togetherness, yearning and satisfaction, the simple and the complex, the past and future, the familiar and the foreign, the other and the self. They are an ode to seeking and to finding, to the rich soil of folk music I've inherited and the glimmering potential of revolutionary creative tools just starting to appear around and through us. They are about the glory of coming home to ourselves and to each other, of learning who we are and where we belong. In that sense, this is about apocalypse — but one world's end makes room for more worlds to begin, and so these anthems, ballads, and inventions are dedicated to becoming and the endless forms most beautiful produced by constant recreation.

Thank you for pausing to take this in and for your help with my ongoing efforts to make music with real smarts AND heart.

In Love & Gratitude,
Michael

(1) michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/get-used-to-being-everything
(2) michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/double-edged-sword-ep
(3) michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/the-cyclist-throwing-sparks-ep