This song, hailing from my 'Portraits and Songscapes' Extneded Play of 2024 is a dedicated song to a dear friend of mine who also writes music, and who has a distinct tendency of writing songs that portray his closest friends. This piece is a response to that tendency, and was written about him in the same way. It focuses on the idea that every thing that you live through and experience you have actively becomes a part of who you are, informing your decisions and your self from that point on, in some way or another. It's very beautiful concept, to me. It kind of pushes home that it every person, and every thing that you'll ever see is an incredibly ornate and intricate piece of living art.

I wrote this piece almost completely in the woods, and you can absolutely feel/hear that. In like a good way. Aptly named 'RainDance' it is a song that I made while frolicking in the warm summer rain of the woods of my hometown in Illinois; these woods had become something of an escape for me in the latter part of my time in Highschool, and I still find myself gravitating towards nature in times of trouble and when I have a greater need for stillness. This song is very dear to me because of this, which is likely why I wanted to share it with a like-minded audience so much. I hoped it would elicit similar feelings in listeners, and be something they would want to dance to, or walk in the woods to.

I had originally written this piece a number of years before its official release, and ended up losing it temporarily, as I'd set some poetry to it, deemed it as 'sorta complete, but also kinda incomplete', and then proceeded to set it aside for an extended period of time. I found that the instrumental was one that stuck with me in the long term as extremely beautiful and satisfying aurally, and I remember thinking that it needed to be shared in some way or another to bring it closure and give it the opportunity to be heard and loved. I released the instrumental under the title of the poem, though with that part of the track cut out. I may eventually release a version with the spoken word, but it will likely be a little while until I do that.

This piece closes out the 'Portraits and Songscapes' release under the same title as the EP itself. Within the track's electro-acoustic soundscape, listeners can hear as I converse and laugh with friends and classmates who were present while I recorded the live piano sampled in the piece. This track is a great showcase of why I made the EP in the first place - it was to capture little moments of life and paint them in sound, so that they could be shared and remembered. This EP is a tiny little menagerie of important little places, times, and events in a mixture of my different musical voices throughout the years.

I wrote the first half of this piece over a year ago, when I was going through a bit of a rough patch emotionally. Inspired by the concept of the art of repairing broken poetry, this song became one that represented a deep personal healing for me. I wrote the second half of the piece in the winter that ended 2024, and decided to connect the two halves into one larger whole, to show the beginning and end of that long and arduous healing process.