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Be Love

After two years of working mostly with existing material, I’m happy to be writing songs again. This one took me over completely for a few days, and then I spent another couple of weeks recording it and animating it on the lattice.

Be Love is a simpler song than Flying Dream, and I think it does a better job of illustrating what the lattice is all about. A couple of notable moments:

  • Several times, all the notes suddenly collapse to the 1, the note in the center. Check out the feeling of arrival, or homecoming in the music when it happens. It’s especially powerful going into the first chorus at 1:12. This is a real-time demo of tonal gravity.
  • During the verse, the song hangs out in the left part of the lattice, and then for the chorus it moves to the right. This is an example of a change in mode — the song stays in the same key (1 is still the center) but two of the scale notes change. The language of pure music doesn’t translate literally to English, or to emotion, but it evokes its own sensations that can support, or contradict, the words and feelings in the lyrics.

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