Complete Text of Louis' interview with Jonathan Widner for JWVIBE.com   

Published 11/13/26 on (www.jwvibe).

• JONATHAN WIDNER: For 42 years, Louis Rosen absorbed the sights, sounds, and restless energy of Brooklyn, a city that inevitably left its imprint on the way he experienced the world. When he and his wife exchanged its familiar urban rhythms for the slower cadence of life in the Hudson Valley, a new chapter began to unfold. Surrounded by trees, gardens, and the ever-changing moods of the seasons, Rosen found himself reconnecting with an artistic impulse that had gone silent for more than three years. 

What began as a tentative reawakening soon gathered momentum, as each emerging idea seemed to illuminate the path to the next. The resulting “Life After Before”—his seventh solo album and 15th overall—is an intimate, deeply personal, and often haunting meditation on how the past shapes our understanding of the present and the possibilities that lie ahead. Listening to the album is a beautiful emotional experience, shaped by Rosen's thoughtful deeply human perspective on life, love and romance. 

The singer’s new project follows “American Sunset”, his sharply observed, politically charged 2025 song cycle, which earned a place among Cadence Magazine’s Top Ten Albums of the year. The two projects could hardly be more dissimilar in atmosphere. Where “American Sunset” confronted the turmoil of the national moment with satire, anger, irony, and ultimately hope, “Life After Before” turns toward the private emotional terrain of everyday existence. Its perspective is subtler, its arrangements more spacious, and its concerns more enduring. Yet both albums share Rosen’s determination to make music that responds honestly to the world he inhabits.

LOUIS ROSEN – LIFE AFTER BEFORE

Interview by Jonathan Widran for “The JW Vibe” (www.jwvibe)

• JW: You've described “Life After Before” as perhaps your most intimate album, and the title itself seems to capture a very particular state of mind: living in the present while feeling the weight of everything that came before. Can you take me back to the moment when that phrase first took hold of you? What did it begin to mean as you developed the songs?

LR: I dreamed the phrase. The song is mostly a straightforward telling of a dream – of walking in some unidentified place and seeing a handwritten wooden sign that read LIFE AFTER BEFORE hanging in the window of an old corner store – and my reaction upon waking, which was to ask the questions that I ask in the song. I didn’t know what the phrase meant, or why I dreamt it, and thus didn’t provide an answer – or even an opinion – in the lyric itself. The lyric takes an almost reportorial approach, which leaves room for the listener to think about the phrase and what it might mean to them. The music creates an evocative atmosphere – a drone bass, with a chord structure that mixes modal and chromatic harmony that helps makes a dream-like, fluid feeling.

I played the album for a small group of students, and one wrote me afterward, fascinated by the song. She told me what the song meant to her – that it helped her realize that she’s spending too much time thinking about her past, and loved ones that were gone, and that the song was a reminder to her that she had to live in the present – that her present was her “life after before”. Her response moved me, and though the album was already completed and mixed, I realized that “Life After Before” should be the album’s title. Up to that point, I thought the album’s title was “Ghost of Desire”. 

I think your interpretation, as expressed in the question, is astute: “A very particular state of mind: living in the present while feeling the weight of everything that came before.” I might add to that, perhaps seeing the sign is a reminder to shed some of that weight, but I’m just guessing. 

• JW: Your previous album, “American Sunset,” was a sweeping, politically charged response to the world around you. This one turns inward, toward love, aging, memory and the changing nature of relationships. Was that contrast a conscious artistic decision, or did these songs emerge organically from a different place in your life? 

LR: It was a very conscious decision. These songs were written in the summer of 2024. Nine months earlier my wife and I had moved from Brooklyn (after 42 years) to the Hudson Valley, and I think these songs captured some of the basic pleasure that I felt living around a lot of trees, with a garden (that my wife and I were in the midst of creating) visible right outside my new studio’s window. 

One of the songs written with this group was political, and captured my hope that our country would send the fellow-who-shall-not-be-named packing into the dust heap of history. Then came the election in November 2024, and I felt an urgent need to respond to that, so I began writing the songs that became the very political album “American Sunset”. The political song originally written for what became this new album suddenly seemed a much better fit on the political album – and placing it there would allow me to draw a strong contrast between the two albums; that “Life After Before” would be gentler, more intimate, more reflective – while “American Sunset” would be extroverted and volatile and overtly political.

So, if you’ve followed the above timeline, the “Life After Before” songs were written first, but because of the immediacy of the moment in our national life and what the “American Sunset” album had to say on the subject, it jumped to the head of the line and was released in October 2025.

• JW: There's a striking line in "Ghost of Desire": "I still don't see the point of fading out just yet." The song acknowledges physical aging and the passage of time, but there's also a defiant sense that desire, creativity and curiosity remain very much alive. Was that the emotional starting point for the album, and how do you personally reconcile the changes that come with getting older with the continuing need to create and explore?

LR: I’ve released five solo albums since 2020, but at this point in my life, I always think that each one may be my last – with the exception of this new one, since it was already written and the basic tracks were recorded by the time the previous one (“American Sunset”) was released. 

Again, going back to the summer of 2024, I hadn’t written a song, music and lyrics, in over three years. I had composed instrumental music, orchestrated and recorded in that period of time, but hadn’t written any new songs. I had collected ideas – possible titles or lyric lines here and there, but never any music – and had no impulse to go any deeper. The combination of getting older, and enjoying a less stressful life out of the city had me wondering if I was simply done. 

But songs are mysterious things. In my experience, there are moments when they begin to appear, when I’m ready to live in that songwriting process again, when my antenna is up, when the ideas I’ve collected since the last album start to ask for attention, when musical ideas begin to materialize and I move into a kind of flow. Writing one song then begets the next and the next. Before you know it you’ve written an album with a set of songs that seem connected.

“Ghost of Desire” was “the emotional starting point for the album.” I accepted what the title meant – that even though my ambition to be out in the world had diminished, I still had the desire – the “ghost of desire” – to make things, to explore – creatively and otherwise – and offer them out to those who might be interested. So, this was the first song written, and the one that started the “begetting” process. That line in the bridge that you cited – “I still don’t see the point of fading out just yet” – wasn’t planned, but when it appeared I understood it as the essential motivating thought for the song, and all that might follow. By the way, when there’s a bridge in the structure of a song, it always contains that song’s essential reason for being.

• JW: You have a remarkably varied background as a composer, songwriter, theater writer and author, moving among classical music, jazz, popular song and musical theater. Yet Life After Before embraces a remarkably elemental folk vocabulary. What does acoustic folk music allow you to express that a more elaborate musical setting might not? And did making this record feel like returning to your musical roots?

LR: I began my professional musical life as a guitar player playing folk-based music and folk rock. All of my early songs were written on guitar in this style. I then began studying music when I was 18. My musical language broadened significantly and I switched my focus to composing on piano. I stayed composing on the piano for almost thirty-five years when, feeling the need for a fresh infusion of ideas, I returned to writing on the guitar. I think the simpler, folk-based character – often folk-rock character – of the “Life After Before” songs resulted from a direct simplicity that I was striving for in the writing; and that musical language and feel is the natural result of my primal relationship with the guitar. You hear it scattered throughout other albums, too, but only two previous albums – each in its own way – dove as deeply into exploring what I could contribute in a folk-based style. (Those albums are the 2013 “Time Was,” and an album of solo instrumental pieces, “Music for Guitar” from 2022.)

But as you suggested, “Life After Before” definitely felt like a return to my youthful roots – and that manifested most in the sound of the album. The album was based on a “what-if” premise: What if I could have written an album of this quality and maturity when I was just starting out? Of course, I couldn’t have, but still, “What if?” How would it sound? I knew that unlike most of my previous albums, I didn’t want to write elaborate arrangements. When I was a young man, I wouldn’t even have had the skills to write arrangements. Enter David Mansfield.

• JW: David Mansfield brings an extraordinary range of experience and instrumental colors to this project. He has worked with Bob Dylan, Bruce Hornsby and an impressive range of artists across several musical worlds. What did you hear in David that made him the right creative partner for these songs? How did the two of you approach the co-production and co-arrangement process, and were there moments when his ideas took a song somewhere you hadn't anticipated?

LR: David and I have performed and recorded together since 2015. He’s a brilliant player of most instruments that have strings who understands roots-based and popular music in a deep, below-the-surface way, and seems to especially thrive when he has the freedom to make up his own parts, and thus directly participate in shaping the arrangements. The “Life After Before” album offered the perfect opportunity for us to work on an album together from start to finish, co-producing and arranging as we went.

How did we approach the work? The form of each song was laid out during the writing. We got together a couple of times in the months leading up to the start of recording, and David listened to me play through the songs, and we discussed possible colors and textures that he could add to each one, perhaps electric guitar on this one, violin and acoustic guitar on that one, etc… and I talked about what musical lines – including background vocal harmonies – that I might want to add myself beyond the foundational instrument I’d be playing on the basic track. But David never played during these sessions. He just listened and took notes.

I then went home and wrote the bass and drum parts, along with any additional piano or guitar counter-melodic parts that I wanted to add, all the while making sure to leave plenty of space in the music for David to create his own lines. 

We then recorded all of the basic tracks in two days. Depending on the song, I played guitar or piano; on bass was the splendid Pete Donovan, who can play anything; Rodney Howard was on drums; and David was on acoustic guitar, seemingly creating and refining his part as we went. I had no idea what those parts were going to be until we began a take. My main contribution to them consisted of me telling him how much I liked what he was playing. We finished these basic tracks sessions with me adding the additional piano or guitar parts that I had planned. 

Next came recording the lead and background vocals. I had a strong sense of how I wanted to approach the vocals, but I always rely on a co-producer – previously, my long-standing collaborator, the brilliant Scott Lehrer, this time David – for feedback; and David pushed me, just as Scott always did, which I really appreciated. We wouldn’t consider a lead vocal finished until we were both satisfied that it was the one; and his judgment helped me shape the background vocal parts – e.g. Is this harmony part working? Do we actually need harmony on this line, etc…

Last, David added the additional instrumental lines that would finish the arrangements. One of the only decisions we made in advance was to have him work on the songs in the order that they would appear on the album – which is close to the order that they were written – insuring that each song would be given its own color palate, that there would be something fresh about the sound as each song arrived in sequence, that each song would arrive as one part of a larger whole – the album. 

We spent two days in David’s studio, where he has about 25 instruments hanging on the walls. He’d begin each song by referring back to his original notes, and then grab an instrument and start to play. I assumed the role that David played while I was recording the vocals – offering feedback, encouragement, sometimes straight out cheerleading. Occasionally I’d suggest that he explore adding a particular instrument on a specific track, or make more of a particular idea – just the usual things a songwriter might do when collaborating with a first-rate instrumentalist to help shape and polish a part. After an hour or so spent on a song, he’d have it, and we’d move on to the next one. We never had a disagreement. It might take some back and forth to nail the polished part, but the collaboration was a pleasure.  I love the way the arrangements turned out, and how the album sounds – which by the way is in no small part due to the great work of James Frazee, who engineered the basic tracks and mixed the album.

• JW: Although the arrangements are spare compared with some of your other work, there's considerable detail in the way the instruments interact. The cello-like resonance of the strings in "Ghost of Desire," the mandolin in "Didi White," the intertwining guitars on the title track, and the violin in "Straight, True Love" all seem to contribute to the storytelling. How do you determine when an arrangement needs another voice, and when the most powerful choice is to leave space?

LR: I’m delighted that the details in the arrangements stood out for you – one of our main goals was to let the songs and the individual instrumental colors breathe, not to crowd the textures. Arrangements should support the lyrics as much as create an effective musical world, so in this case, less is more was a guiding principal. 

About the songs you mentioned: Pete Donovan is such a great bass player – popular and classical music – that everyone I’ve played the album for comments on the beauty of the cello texture in “Ghost of Desire,”; except there is no cello on “Ghost of Desire.” Pete’s bowed bass sound has such a pure tone that it’s easily mistaken for cello. And then David added a simple, effective viola part, which further contributes to that warm, bowed texture. He surprised me with the idea of adding viola here – one of my favorite colors – and I think it finished the arrangement beautifully.

You also mentioned the intertwining guitar parts on that song – which is a feature on so many of the songs, really… Credit for that, too, largely goes to David. He listened well to the guitar parts I was playing, and then built complimentary parts that joined with mine so effectively that sometimes they are sonically hard to separate. Two other examples of this on the album that I particularly love are “Do You Think of Me?” and “Candice and Me.”

“Didi White”: We both played guitar parts capo’d four or five frets up the neck, so that when the mandolin enters it intensifies an already wonderfully jangly, almost 12-string texture. Once David found the mandolin part – which is simple in and of itself – we knew that sound, along with the background harmony vocals, were all the additional colors that the song needed.

You also mentioned “Straight, True Love.” Again, he listened to the way I played my guitar part – which most of the time doubled the sung melody – and then approached his part in the style of “porch music” – as if everyone hanging out on some imagined porch has joined in playing or singing the melody in his or her own way. That may be the only song where he played three instruments: a 2^nd acoustic guitar, the expressive violin part and banjo, which is my favorite part of the texture. I’d wanted to find a place for banjo in an arrangement for years and finally got it!

• JW: You've mentioned that improvisation played an important role in making the album. That's an intriguing idea in the context of songs that are so carefully constructed and lyrically focused. Where did improvisation enter the process? Was it primarily in the instrumental performances, or did it also influence the development of the songs themselves? 

LR: Improvisation is always a tool of composition, but the improvisation that I was referring to is David’s approach to creating his additional instrumental lines.

• JW: "45 Minutes to Somewhere" is a particularly cinematic piece of storytelling. We meet a man who has spent 45 years in the same town, feels trapped by the repetition of his life, and suddenly imagines a train as a way out. There's humor and melancholy, but also a genuine sense of possibility. Do you see yourself as inhabiting characters when you write songs like this, and what inspired this particular portrait of restlessness?

LR: I’ve written a lot of songs over the years from the perspective of various characters. In some sense though, all songs come from a particular character’s point of view. Listeners might sometimes confuse a song that seems to come from a personal place with autobiography, but most songs are a mix of personal experience and storytelling, and obviously, essential components of storytelling are creating characters and making things up.

I’m glad you picked up on the cinematic character of this one. I almost pictured it as a short film while writing it. 

An anecdote about the idea itself: Having moved up to the Hudson Valley, I was often asked by people who didn’t know the area if I was near some other town – fill in the blank – that they knew was also in the Hudson Valley. I found myself usually replying that the place in question was about 45 minutes or so from where I lived, which morphed into the possible title idea, “45 Minutes to Somewhere.” Then one day when I was driving it became, 

“45 minutes to somewhere 

Nowhere

Anywhere

45 minutes to any other place but here.” 

Now, that was a darker idea than the initial impulse that created the title line. I had no idea where it would lead to, but within a few days I fleshed out a story that I thought was worth telling about a character that I found interesting. One of my favorite set of lines from the album is in this song:

“Too much malt after midnight

Last night

Every night

Drink enough malt, you’re waitin’ for the worm to turn

Too much malt, you’re thinkin’ that it all should burn.”

I also like that as the story evolves, the narrator gets closer and closer to the train that he hears whistling for him in somewhere in the distance, but we don’t experience him actually ever boarding the train. Does he? Can he bring himself to leave this town and his life behind? 

• JW: "Didi White" has the vivid atmosphere of a short story or a scene from a film: a freezing Chicago night, a red-haired actress, a bar, a conversation over drinks, and a romance understood from the beginning to be temporary. The line "Acting was her trade, but living was her art" tells us so much about her. Is “Didi” drawn from a real encounter, a composite of memories, or an entirely imagined character? And what is it about that kind of fleeting connection that makes it worth preserving in a song?

LR: The song is all the things that you asked about. I named the character for someone I briefly knew when I was a young man who had an interesting story; but a different woman from that same time of my life actually snuck in during the writing process and largely took over the narrative. Either way, the Didi as portrayed here is a fictional character. Specific memories are definitely captured – a freezing, snow-clogged Chicago winter night, a date with a redheaded actress, a scene in a bar, memories of each woman's strong, seductive personality filtered through the fractured lens of fifty years – yet it’s also fiction, and a snapshot. Snapshots are selectively focused and never tell the whole story, but they hopefully capture the essence of a moment. 

Part of the origin story of this one dates back a couple of years before the song was written, when one evening I happened to be watching a television show that dated back to the mid-1970’s – and there was that redheaded actress. She had, in fact, made it out to Los Angeles “where her fortune would be found.” I thought about the brief time we spent together and wondered how her life turned out. When I Google’d her, I learned that she had recently died. A couple of years later, while in the stream of one song begetting another, this story seemed worth the telling. I think the song expresses how certain moments and encounters, the joys and the stings, live forever in your memory, and how you can’t leave the stings out if you want the story to have the ring of truth. That’s why I’m fond of the couplet: 

“She’ll bruise you with a smile

Then choose you with her heart.”

• JW: There's an interesting contrast between the romantic uncertainty of "Everyone Loves the Wrong Someone" and the more hopeful turn when you sing, "I loved the right someone at the right time." The song begins almost like a universal observation about the mistakes people make in love, then becomes something much more personal. Were you interested in challenging the familiar idea that love is inevitably a matter of bad timing?

LR: I had the title “Everyone Loves the Wrong Someone” for about five years, but didn’t feel that I had a song until I realized I could make that turn into the good luck of having found the “right someone,” which in my case, is a lucky fact. Without that turn, you’d just have a list song about all the mistakes we make in relationships, which I didn’t think was very interesting or an idea worthy of a song. And it wouldn’t have been honest coming from me. I’d argue that it’s more fun and more surprising that, despite initial impressions, the song turned out to be an off-beat, unexpected love song. 

• JW: "Do You Think of Me?" approaches the end of a relationship through a series of questions, with the vocal echoes and overlapping phrases almost suggesting two people having an imaginary conversation. The arrangement makes the inner dialogue feel as important as the words themselves. How did you envision that musical treatment, and were you exploring the difference between remembering someone and still feeling emotionally connected to them?

LR: The song could be two people having an imaginary conversation, or one person’s inner monologue until the end when the other imagined voice is actually heard. But it’s possible that I blew getting the content of the story across, because to me, if you follow the lyric’s train of thought, the song begins as if this couple has broken apart, or is for some unstated reason, separated, but actually moves them to a proposal, or perhaps a renewal of vows. 

“Say goodbye to our loneliness

Two become one and the dream is true 

Say I do 

You and me and you and me and you…” 

Regarding the arrangement, this is one where I had a pretty clear sense of how I wanted the track to sound, the sensual atmosphere created by our intertwined steel-string guitars, the high, echo-y counter-melodic lines on piano, the spare use of nylon string guitar, the spare bass part, no drums, only cymbals. It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album because of the atmosphere it creates – the way it sounds. 

• JW: "Candice and Me" has a gentler, more settled perspective. The garden becomes a metaphor for building a life together, tending to it and protecting it even as the larger world becomes increasingly turbulent. What does the garden represent to you? And is this song intended as a counterpoint to the uncertainty and impermanence that run through so much of the album?

LR: The simple answer is “Yes.” That’s why it’s placed second to last in the song sequence. I still think of the album structure as an LP format having a Side One - which in this case would end with the song, “Life After Before” - and Side Two. There’s an emotional logic that takes the listener through the entire album, with the songs on 
Side Two gradually accepting and embracing the possibility of real love in a hard world, first with someone of your own choosing, and last between parent and child. 

The garden that’s right outside my studio window is a private haven amidst the tumult of life on earth. It's my favorite place. I’d even go out on a limb and say that “Candice and Me” is my favorite among all the songs I’ve ever written. It’s the only song I’ve ever recorded twice – a different version appears on “American Sunset.” I like that version a lot, but this one is even better. I took a different approach to the lead and harmony vocals this time, and David’s complimentary acoustic guitar countermelody and viola parts add so much. This track joins “Do You Think of Me?” as the two tracks that I think offer the most sensually satisfying listening.

• JW: "Straight, True Love" is especially moving because its perspective seems to shift across generations. It begins with a son's gratitude for his father, then turns toward a young man receiving the same kind of unconditional love. The message that love matters more than money is beautifully direct. What inspired that generational structure, and did you always envision the song as a reflection on how love is passed from one generation to the next?

LR: I wanted to try to write to write a simple, direct song about a subject that’s actually really deep – my father’s remarkable ability to love unconditionally. As the writing took hold, I realized that the real song was about a continuum, that love begets love, and how it becomes the son’s responsibility to try to pass on what he had been fortunate enough to receive. 

This felt like the riskiest song on the album to me – the music is, as David described it, “porch music,” written to sound like a folk song, like something that’s always existed. The lyric idea needed to lean into its sentiment, but avoid overly simplified, sentimental expression. David got this immediately, and we were in 100% agreement that we needed to present the song simply – that if we overproduced it, we’d kill it. His embrace of "Straight, True Love" at one of our early meetings actually convinced me that he was the perfect producing and arranging partner for the album.

• JW: Your work with Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou demonstrates a long-standing interest in giving musical life to language written by others. With “Life After Before,” you're working entirely with your own lyrics, but the songs often have the narrative richness and emotional architecture of theater. Does your experience writing for the stage influence the way you develop characters, scenes and dramatic turns in your songs? Do you approach a three- or four-minute song as a kind of miniature play?

LR: Perhaps because of having spent over twenty years working in the theater, I developed my personal lyric-writing style and craft to combine the precision of my favorite theater songwriting with the poetic use of metaphor, imagery, ambiguity and wit of my favorite popular songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Randy Newman among many others.  But no, I don’t approach a song as a miniature play. All good theater songwriting builds from specific characters in particular situations. The theater shows you a story. A song on its own will more likely tell you a story, or dispense with story altogether and explore an idea. 

My songs fall into two broad categories, both of which are pretty common:  story songs or idea songs. The first is a song where I know at the outset of the writing process the general outline of the story I want to tell and who the characters are. On this album, that would be “Didi White” and “Life After Before.” With this type of song, the writing itself becomes about who the characters are, how to tell the story, and why the story is worth telling. This approach is more akin to writing a short story than a miniature play, but has the extra edge of the music’s emotional impact, which is vital because of the compressed nature of lyric writing. 

The second type of song is one where I begin with an idea – perhaps a title, or an opening line – and the writing becomes an exploration, a process of discovering what that idea or line is about, what it implies, where it will lead, why does it want to be written. Most of the other songs on this album fit in that category, “Ghost of Desire,” “Rhythm of the Road,” “Candice and Me,” etc… The narrator in this type of song is still a character, but the listener likely assumes that character is some version of the songwriter. 

For me, both song types share one fundamental trait, and this probably does relate back, however vaguely to my previous life working in the theater: All the songs have a sense of movement, a progression, an evolution of the subject matter from the first line to the last – in other words, a beginning, middle and end. And again, the music, of course, takes care of at least half the storytelling. 

One song on the album that falls into the cracks between these two types is “45 Minutes to Somewhere.” It’s a story song, but as I mentioned earlier, I had to discover the story and who the character was in the course of writing it.  

Last, of course there are exceptions to all of this: I’ve written a number of songs combine telling a story with exploring an idea and offering play-like dialogue between two characters. The beautiful thing about songwriting is that you can do whatever you want as long as you can pull it off.

• JW: You've spent decades teaching music and introducing audiences and students to everything from classical composition to jazz, popular songwriting and The Beatles. Does teaching continue to influence your own creative process? And after such a wide-ranging career, with so many different kinds of music and storytelling behind you, what still surprises you about writing a song and hearing it come to life?

LR: I’m not an academic – not in the least. I didn’t know how to read music or anything formally about music until I was almost 19 years old. For many years I felt the insecurity of playing catch up with colleagues who had been studying in one form or another since they were children. But teaching turned out to be an essential part of my development as a composer, because it kept me listening and studying a broad range of music and techniques across many centuries and styles – classical, popular, folk, jazz and on and on. The broader a composer’s range of reference across multiple genres, the better equipped he or she is to realize the ideas that they want to express. I’m really a late bloomer. There’s no doubt that I’ve done most of my best work over the past 25 years, in these post-theater years.

Regarding the 2^nd part of your question, I’m always surprised when I’m writing a song. That’s a lot of the fun. The first song on my “I Don’t Know Anything” album is titled “Before the Window Closes,” and it’s the closest I’ve gotten in a song to expressing the joy and wonder that you feel “when the window is open” and you’re on a creative roll, whatever the discipline, and you follow the urge to push it as far as you can “before the window closes.” Or there’s the pleasure of listening to terrific musicians play a new orchestration that you’ve made for the first time, or hearing remarkably imaginative ideas that a player like David Mansfield brings to a song – can’t beat it. 

• JW: What was the most rewarding part of making this album from a creative standpoint? What do you like most about it and what do you hope listeners take away from the experience?

LR: For me the most rewarding part was the beginning – the writing itself – and the ending – getting to hear the completed work. Everything in between is stimulating and satisfying, but it’s hard work!

My hopes are pretty ordinary stuff: I hope listeners are emotionally moved in a variety of ways by the album; excited by the way the music sounds; that they find ideas in the lyrics stimulating and the music affecting in ways both satisfying and surprising; that perhaps they’ll clue in to the larger arc of the album and want to keep listening again and again. And something that I can hope for with this album, which isn’t always the case with my work, is that the album actually makes people feel good. That would be swell.