These piano pieces are going to be the hardest things for me to write about on the album. I'm not the world's best piano player. (I'm avoiding calling myself a "pianist" because I don't think I've earned the title. And also to avoid giggling.)

I wrote "The Cycle" as a single piece in 2014 and I haven't known what to do with it ever since. But every time I sit down at a piano (or keyboard) I play it. I didn't even have the title until very recently--it took me years to choose which words represented what's going on inside me when I play it.

When I approached this album I knew I was finally going to have a place to play "The Cycle" but I didn't want to do it as the straightforward 10-minute piano piece I'd demoed at home in the past. I opted to split it into its separate parts. And to keep it simple and short. So that's why there are four parts. And I've spaced them out so that the songs that precede and follow them all "make sense" within the framework of what I'm expressing in the "cycle" of these songs. That's why in the introduction I wrote for the album I said I hope you look at the whole thing as one piece. There's a lot happening here.

Each part is named more or less after an emotion I'm trying to convey. This one is called "Grief." You can probably figure that out. I consider this the "main theme" of the whole thing. It was written during a period where I was trying to figure things out and thought "it can't get any worse." Look over my albums that came out after 2014 to see if that held up...