In the North Cascade mountains in Washington state, there’s a hiking trail called the Maple Pass Loop. It’s covered in snow most of the year, so when you get there on a sunny weekend in July the cars are spilling out of the parking lot and stacked up for a quarter-mile along highway SR-20. The trail begins in familiar old-growth forest as you work your way uphill, crossing a few small streams and waterfalls working their way down the mountains to the alpine lakes below. The scenery winds on unremarkably like this for a couple miles before the trees give way to the open ridgeline, and as you round a final switchback suddenly you exit the forest and burst into a new world entirely. The lakes a glimmering turquoise beneath you. Wildflowers in purple and yellow and red and pink. The Cascades all around in every direction, spreading out like ripples on a snow-capped pond. And the sky. The sky. The sky a boundless azure expanse that levels you, arrests you, tranquilizes you. Standing beneath it you feel something deep and old resonate within you, something at once both urgent and placid that makes you content to sit quietly, breathe through your nose, and marvel at how spectacular it is to be alive.

Time is a strange companion; the longer I spend with it, the less familiar it seems. Yet time is the ultimate judge and inquisitor, sitting patiently behind every moment and silently imploring, “How will you spend your finite duration?” Finite. Yes, the older I get it seems like the human condition largely consists in answering this question, as these decisions ultimately form the story of what your life was about. Most of these songs were written during my first year after graduating college and joining the working world, a time when these themes of decisions and stories became particularly salient. As you get older, the course-correcting guardrails of youth fall away one by one, and at some point it dawns on you that life is an open plane where you can actually go any direction you want. This is equally exhilarating and terrifying, as clearly defining a target risks missing it or picking the wrong thing, while the temptation to avoid a clear definition runs the risk of you becoming something you didn’t choose.

This album is partially about time. About the passage of time, and the stories we tell ourselves to bear its passage. About becoming something, and deciding what to become. About the difference between getting old and growing up. But in another sense this album is about what’s timeless, and its pursuit. About figuring out what’s really important, and what “important” means. About discerning what’s true from what makes a good story. About finding the courage to ask yourself what you really want and to accept the responsibility that it’s your life to spend.

I hope I’ve managed to say something. I hope you sing along. And I hope that, as you go about answering these questions in your own life, you find a moment now and again to look up at the sky and notice its color, the same color it’s been since before life existed. I hope you consider the billions of neurons and trillions of photons conspiring to show you this color, take a breath, and smile at how special it is to be here to see it. To be and to have been.

I hope you find your perfect chord.

Travis Klein 5/31/21

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