i feel like whenever I hear a Classical Music piece that is about death, the piece always ends with long, slow upwards scale. it kind of illustrates our ideas of death and afterlife. how does a body leave the earth? or where do we go when we die? up, right? towards the heaven? our “spirits” ascending?

i don’t really ascribe to that folklore but I like the auditory image. something feels very delicate about a scale that just keeps going up. you lose the depth, substance and weight of lower pitches and replace it with the fuzziness and harmonics of the higher ones.

ravel does this, but at the beginning of his string quartet. it feels ethereal, and impressionistic.

I happened to be playing Ravel when I wrote this song, so I added the first couple measures as an outro….ending where he started.

some of the last lyrics of the song are: “someday i know this will end…” which is why i wanted this outro. there is both certainty and uncertainty in that statement. we don’t know when or how something will end, but we do know that it will. and i hope you can feel that paradox in the music.

you can listen to the full song (“my little brother”) September 30th.