Live

There are times when I want to stray
All night. All day
Oh, I never once believed in one faith
And now is a tad too late

Did you ever wonder, perhaps we're all crazed, just in different ways?

But I hear that you're coming back tomorrow
And I know I will be somewhere higher
Where I feel something deeper
I have been waiting here for you

Close your eyes
Think of mine
Do you still think they love you?
Baby don't say it's another lie

And I know
That my eyes believe
That my thoughts belong to no one else but you
It's all you
I stayed alive for promised love

Did you find love away from pain?
And I know it was a long wait to be alone under your name
You did what you could to stay aground
You did what you could to stay aground

Things have come
And go yet again
But I, I have longed to touch you
I've stayed alive for promised love

Loretta, in light of my truth
Here I stand alone to try and explain
I'll say the words in a way that is just and fair, controlled and right by you
And I'm sorry I've held on for too long
And I'm sorry I've held on for too long

My eyes are red
Red from the blood
That stains the past that never seems to leave

I am haunted by places
Tormented faces
With words I can barely bring myself to hear

In the weariness of one twilight hour
I find true pain
And it seems eternal
Amber

I will light a fire
To keep me warm in here
And hope to live another light of day

In the weariness of one twilight hour
I find true pain
And it seems eternal
Amber

Tonight, let me sleep, please hold my thoughts
Hold their spirits, hold their troubled souls
Amber

Songs formed in the late 1990s and brought forward decades later as memory, music, and proof of creative life.

I started playing guitar when I was in Grade 6.

The songs in this album began taking shape in the late 1990s, when I was in high school and university. It was a time when I could finally afford to buy my own music, a computer, and some home recording equipment. For the first time, I had a way to record the music I had been writing and playing.

Seven instrumental pieces recorded between 2012 and 2014, shaped by earlier questions about science, religion, God, non-belief, origins, and humanity.

In 2007 and 2008, I became deeply immersed in questions about existence.

Is there a God? Is there life after death? Who are we? What are we? How did the universe, the Earth, and human beings come into existence? I read about science, religion, philosophy, and everything in between, trying to understand not only what might be true, but why human beings believe the things we believe.

But before anyone could enter the empty hemisphere, they had to survive the cold that guarded its door. That is where the story begins.

This is the short, citation-free version of the How We Spread Across the Earth arc — the three-part story of how our species, born on a single continent, came to stand on all of them. It compresses those three entries — The African Dawn (#0016), Out of Africa (#0017), and Into the New World (#0018) — into one self-contained narrative.

This is a recent and, in the long view, abnormal condition. For almost the whole of the human story, the Earth held several kinds of human at once. As recently as fifty thousand years ago — a flicker, in the time-scales this project works in — our planet was home to Homo sapiens in Africa and the Near East, the Neanderthals across Europe and western Asia, the Denisovans somewhere in the vast Asian interior, the tiny Homo floresiensis on an Indonesian island, and another small human, Homo luzonensis, on a Philippine one.

We left the previous entry at a gate. Our species had existed for something like a quarter of a million years, almost all of it inside Africa. It had pressed against the northern exits more than once, during the wet intervals when the desert greened, and each time it had fallen back, leaving no lasting line beyond the continent. Then, sometime around seventy thousand years ago, the corridors opened again, and this time the people who passed through kept going. Everything in this entry follows from that crossing.