FIRST TIMER is an album of themes I experienced in meeting Martindale Brightwood: themes of generational community and resiliency. I explore these themes in a style of songwriting known as narrative storytelling, with strong imagery, dialogue between the voices, and a narrative plot found not only in each song but throughout the album. While I know these songs could never tell the full story of Martindale Brightwood, they share my small glimpse into this beautiful neighborhood.
All the art that I've found ever worth creating and/or engaging with has centered me around connection by inviting curiosity. The album's first track "1. WHAT MAKES A QUESTION GOOD?" was a song and a question born out of my desire to approach my residency with my only agenda being connection. At the time that I started, I was wrestling with how to ask good questions with pure intentions when coming into such a strategic thing as a place-based songwriting residency, and I kept coming back to the ideas that I reveal in track 5 on the album: curiosity and connection. Meanwhile during my residency, I was encouraged by Doug Wilson's poem "Epistle At the Narrow Water", which inspired much of the instrumentation in Track 1.
Tracks 2 through 4 explore Martindale Brightwood's story through the eyes of Greatriarch and writer Eunice Trotter, asking questions such as "Who gets to decide what stays in a culture, and how have the answers to that question happened in Martindale Brightwood?" Of course these answers vary, but I have found that despite the many physical and cultural changes that Martindale Brightwood has seen over the generations, the people in Martindale Brightwood have fostered community. I saw it at Pre-Enact. They have fostered beauty in how they remember the fruit on the trees, and they have become resilient despite the waves of gentrification that they have passed through. Lastly, track 5, "5. THIS MIGHT BE WHAT MAKES A QUESTION GOOD." was written in answer to Track 1, and it was written as a reharmonization of the doxology as a nod to Redeemer.
There are so many more things to say about this album, but the conclusion I have arrived at in my art-making has been this: maybe what makes a question good lies not so much in fancy words nor simple as it does in what one wants out of the question. I want connection, and I intend to get there by choosing curiosity in the wake of complexity.