Production & Studio Work

Stages of Sonder

The recorded composition that accompanied my graduate thesis

This recording (and accompanying paper) is a large scale personal artistic and academic achievement. Every instrument in Stages of Sonder was performed by myself—with the exception of the cello lead in movement 2 & and cello doubling in movement 3 (both played by Maggie Chafee). Also, all lyrics were written by me and all music was composed, recorded, edited, and mixed by myself in my studio in Nashville, Tennessee.

Although there are five clearly defined movements in Stages of Sonder, the entire 28-minute piece is ideally intended to be listened to in one sitting, as you would a symphony. It is, in essence, somewhat of a “concept album,” or one that is tied together by a unifying narrative theme. In this case, my narrative deals with the concept of “sonder,” a word defined by John Koenig as follows:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

I explore this concept through a first-person narrated experience of “sonder” related to the phenomenon, The Five Stages of Grief: Denial, Depression, Anger, Bargaining, and Acceptance.