The Path: Stories with Strangers - The Path

"The Path" is the story of my pain as a child and teenager. There's no way that I could put my experience succinctly, so my music speaks better than words here.

This piece really was a favorite among my friends and peers, especially freshman year of college. The melody is catchy, the syncopation is insane and all over the place. It's quite funny: three boys that I liked in college tried to play the piece but could never figure out the syncopated parts in the left hand.

Am I cocky about that? You bet I am!

The piece is deceptively simple, with its generally steady right hand melody, only two sections back and forth over just three chords: F, G or Em, Am

I did not understand the meaning of "The Path" when I wrote it, just before going off to college, and polishing the arrangement and exact chord voicings during my freshman year.

Although this piece was written before the previous track ("When the Dream Begins to End"), I stuck this one at the end of the album because it is the most powerfully emotional and evocative piece on the album, if not of every piece I've ever written (that would be by a small margin, though).

This piece came to me as I rode my bike away from my house in a moment of heated frustration, but I quickly returned home upon hearing the main A-section's melody in my head.

I love that I did not know or understand the depth and significance to my life that this piece would have when I wrote it. I felt I finally understood on a soul level what it was trying to convey to me about four years later, when I graduated from college, and ha, it's been just about four years since then. I wonder if I will come to understand any more potential hidden layers of this piece in another four years. I guess we'll see.