These song demos continue thoughts on themes we have been living from 2020 and onward. Similar to how the original seven songs of QUIET AND SIRENS were written and recorded during a two-week quarantine in July and August 2020, these final three songs were written and recorded over a one-week period in August 2023.

The first song is based on testimony from my friends and neighbors who suffer (much of the time invisibly) from Long Covid and post-Covid disorders. The second is an invitation to lament I improvised on multiple vocal tracks over a few hours. The finale is an invitation to hope and an ode to the most vulnerable people in our society, who often live on its fringes by necessity. I've included a few quotes to accompany these songs, below.

Thank you for listening in 2020, and to these new songs in 2023, which serve to complete the song cycle QUIET AND SIRENS.

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“The entire world will have to prepare for a legacy of long-covid sufferers.”

- The Editorial Board of The Washington Post, February 2023
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“‘Moments that affected me don’t feel like they’re part of me anymore. It feels like I am a void and I’m living in a void.’”

- Hannah Davis on brain fog, quoted in “One of Long COVID’s Worst Symptoms Is Also Its Most Misunderstood,” by Ed Yong, The Atlantic, September 2022
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“The fatigue she now feels is ‘like a complete depletion of the essence of who you are, of your life force.’”

- Alexis Misko, quoted in “Fatigue Can Shatter a Person,” by Ed Yong, The Atlantic, July 2023
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“As a nation, we need to gather our collective courage and face that our society's lovelessness is a wound. ... Recognition of the wound is a blessing because we are able to tend it, to care for the soul in ways that make us ready to receive the love that is promised."

- bell hooks, ALL ABOUT LOVE, 2000
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“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”

- Walter Brueggemann, “Suffering Produces Hope,” 1998
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“Botanists used to think that the length of daylight a plant was exposed to determines whether it would form flowers. But experiments proved otherwise. It’s the length of darkness that a plant experiences that plays the most crucial role.”

- Oregon State University Newsroom, January 2022
(quoted by artist Austin Kleon in his writings, March 2023)
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“What we dream of is already present in the world.”

- Rebecca Solnit, HOPE IN THE DARK (3rd edition), 2015
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“I obviously could not read the record this errant moss was writing, but it did at least tell me, ‘I’m alive.’ And the next day: ‘Still alive.’

... Most of all, it has been a reminder of time: not the monolithic, empty substance imagined to wash over each of us alone, but the kind that starts and stops, bubbles up, collects in the cracks, and folds into mountains. It is the kind that waits for the right conditions, that holds always the ability to begin something new.”

- Jenny Odell, SAVING TIME, 2023