The Wild Song

You can preview the album's first single, Richard Strauss's Allerseelen, which will officially release on January 30, 2026, here: 

Artist Notes on The Wild Song:

When Marina and I recorded The Wild Song, I was in the throes of one of life’s difficult moments. Singing such wonderful music with such a skilled and passionate pianist had a profound effect on me. I wrote this journal entry the following day, and Marina and I wanted to include it with our album in order to shed light on how this music came to be. It references the brilliant poem, A Tree Telling of Orpheus, by Denise Levertov. 

Journal 9/22/24

Last night it came back to me -- who I really am. Myself fitting myself like a glove. A turning inside out. Memories of who I once was, cells of being I'd thought had dissipated, dispersed into the ether, instead, I found, had grown solid and wound around my heart like the roots of two trees melded together. It's like I've always said -- it can't be taken from me, the music.

Marina, Gerard, the recording engineer, and I met at a small, darkened church in Purcellville. We waited out the thunderstorm. When the rain finally faded - not until nearly nine o'clock -- we started to record our music: Barber, Vaughan Williams, Mozart, John Duke, Cesti, Strauss, Donaudy, Britten. All the things that fill my mind all day every day, -- my anxiety over work, my fears for my children, my profound dissonance with the world and society as it is, my desperate, impossible desire to go back in time or escape to an untouchable corner of the earth -- they didn't exist for those hours. Nothing existed except me, Marina, and Gerard, and the soaring beauty of the music, and the memories and meanings of the music which, formerly a mere fun side project, suddenly became the most important things in the world. 

And I, transformed. My voice, shredded from weeks of teaching large classrooms of heedless, unconcerned children, rose to meet me. Rose to meet the music. Together we navigated the beautifully intricate path the music laid before us of words, dynamics, shorts and longs and connecteds and whispereds and pusheds and pulleds, and, above all, the unsayable emotions that inspire every nuance, every tiny twist in the path. We did well, my voice and I. The years of studying, learning, and acquiring those skills, that acute attention, were part of me now. It was no longer something I was trying to do. It was something I was doing.

At moments, I felt my feet lift off the ground. I felt my whole body lifted by the sheer power of breath and music flowing through my cells. My arms and legs tingling, my mind blurred, I felt myself and Marina propelled into the skies, the music buoying us up among the clouds, even the cosmos. I felt the weightlessness, I felt the thrill of speed, I felt the freedom of unseen wings. The sounds of her piano, like an uproarious orchestra, became a massive tidal wave for me to ride on, my voice surfing the uncontainable swell of pure joy, shouting loudly, declaring, that this is the absolute best of who I can be, this is what I am meant to be, this is who I really am. Here I am!

If only I could live on the tidal wave. An impossible idea. 

I'm a tree of Orpheus. I felt the thrill, I uprooted, I danced. And now, I wait for his return. I revel in the glory of the memory. I overflow with gratefulness for having known it. Known, I say, not in my mind but in the finest fibers of my being, in the darkest, most hidden corners of my soul. The music!