来日 / To Japan

I wrote this is 2014 when I decided to leave my home to explore a place and culture I’ve always been fascinated by. What I experienced on that journey changed me profoundly.

I documented the process through music, writing a song in each city I visited on a little guitar I bought in a pawn shop. I also took field recordings as I went; a musician’s version of photographs. As the songs came together I realized that what I was writing was in fact a story.

来日 is pronounced rai-ni-chi and it refers to the travel to Japan by a foreigner. My cousin Drake came up with that title. The album tells of a love trying desperately to escape the wake of a beautiful world—to survive the forces we are subject to in order to discover something more sublime between us.