It all started in New Zealand in November of 2017. My wife, Claire and I had just arrived at a tiny beachfront cabin we’d rented on the edge of the Bay of Island in the North Island. Ironically, there was a decent WiFi connection for the first time in several days and for no apparent reason I decided to check my email’s spam folder - something I never do. To my astonishment, there were 4 unread emails from Roundhead Studios, the beautiful multi-room recording complex in Auckland, owned by songwriter and musician extraordinaire, Neil Finn of Crowded House and Split Enz fame. Recording there had been a highly improbable pipe dream of mine since we began planning our trip a few years earlier. A couple of months before, I had written to the studio’s manager inquiring about the possibility of recording a new song while in the country. But because I never heard back (I thought), I assumed it wasn’t going to happen. Their emails confirmed, in fact, that there was some open studio time on the date I’d requested and to please be in touch to book the session. The open date was Friday, November 17 – just two days away! We’d only left Auckland the day before and driven several hundred kilometers to get to the Bay Of Islands. Before deciding what to do, I called the studio to confirm the room was still available - It was. Then I asked Claire what she thought and without hesitation she said, “We’re going!” Our fates were sealed. We piled our things back into the tiny rented Toyota and bombed straight back to Auckland, with no idea where we’d stay and a little anxiety about what to expect the next day. Be careful what you want. You might get it.

I needn’t have worried. The studio personnel treated us like royalty (I’ve come to find out they treat ALL their customers that way - Image that!?) and the session was one of the smoothest and most productive I’d had in years. I recorded the piano and vocal tracks for the song Paradise that I’d written only weeks earlier, inspired by what I’d witnessed back home with the massive wildfires sweeping through our bucolic county of Sonoma, north of San Francisco in the Bay Area. In fact, while we were evacuated and trying to decide whether or not we should even go to New Zealand, our son, a wildland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service at the time, was battling the fast moving, 150-foot flames that threatened to destroy our neighborhood and possibly the whole town. Thankfully, the firefighters’ efforts were successful and our home was spared, though many friends and colleagues lost everything in a matter of minutes.

Recording Paradise in New Zealand in late 2017 cracked open a door I had nail shut several years earlier. After some minor but important recognition for projects as a recording artist in the 80’s, and then as a composer/producer in the video game industry (remember “SEGA!?”) throughout the 1990’s, and finally as the president of Ex’pression College for Digital Arts until 2011, I was suddenly called to service to take care of my mother during the last three years of her life. She was alone and living in the next county over, still fiercely independent but wrestling with a number of serious ailments made more challenging by the onset of dementia. When I emerged from that experience after her passing in 2015 I felt like a rudderless ship, just drifting with no real purpose or direction or will. The joy and satisfaction I’d gotten my whole life from composing music seemed like a blurry memory and I had doubts anything at all would come out if I tried to open the rusty spigot again.

But instead it seemed like the floodgates were opening and the ideas and melodies began to flow again. I could feel that familiar childlike giddy enthusiasm to explore and discover and learn and grow starting to return. So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020 I took it as an opportunity and a challenge to fully commit to producing a body of new material. One of the first songs I wrote and recorded was This Is The Day, a song about waking up in the middle of a global pandemic and choosing to live on day at a time.

Then, on the morning of Monday, September 28, 2020 I received one of those phone calls you can never imagine and will never forget. My daughter was crying, trying to tell me through gasps and sobs that her partner of ten years had just been killed in a head-on collision on a backroad in Marin County. He had kissed her and their daughter goodbye and left only 45-minutes earlier. Now he was gone. Here. Then gone. Forever. From that moment forward my view of the universe and sense of place in it has been forever altered.

From this unthinkable tragedy came the relative comfort of accepting that there is an infinite and universal tapestry that connects the souls of all beings, from every dimension. And that maybe we have to travel to the depths of grief and loss and despair to finally find the true light that illuminates our path. For me, there is so much wisdom and so many answers in the stories we tell each other. The stories that make us feel not quite so alone and the ones that make us believe that anything is possible. Some stories we have “lived” and some are conjured from the vastness of our imagination. But they are all important.

Here and Gone is a collection of my stories put to music in an attempt to process and channel the joy and grief and love and anger and hope that has marked the last few years. It’s my hope that these songs take you on a sonic journey and introduce you to characters and places that make you ask questions and want to see what else is out there. Thank you for taking this journey.

Peace!

Please reach out & let me know your thoughts: spencer.illumina@gmail.com