That being said, I encountered this in mainstream music recently, and I wanted to share it with you.  I’ve been listening to Coldplay’s new record, “Mylo Xyloto,” on which they have an incredible track called Charlie Brown.  There are a handful of YouTube videos of them performing it live, and at the end of each performance, Chris Martin ditches his acoustic guitar and sits down at the piano to play what seems like a simple outro.  But I knew I recognized it from somewhere… then it hit me, he’s tagging the main theme from the song Christmas Time Is Here, which is fittingly off of the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s beloved “A Charlie Brown Christmas” album – in my opinion, the best Christmas jazz record of all time.  You’ll probably recognize the pattern:

Now watch Coldplay perform Charlie Brown, paying particular attention to 4:13, when he starts tagging the Vince Guaraldi Trio.  He voices the chords differently to make it fit, and I hope you appreciate the allusion as much as I do.

Cheers,
HWN

The first time I heard that song, it sunk into me like it belonged there, and always had.  Beautiful words do that – they assume a position in your life as though they were quietly looming, but the timing wasn’t quite right.  Suddenly, there they are, and you can’t imagine your life before them.  I have no idea what the hell Justin Vernon is saying in “Holocene.”  It doesn’t matter; it speaks to me in a way that other songs don’t.

When I took on He Who Never and started recording music, I put my foot down and decided that I was fed up with artist secrecy.  I was frustrated by an evasive industry that presented itself when and how it wanted to, ostracizing personal connection for risk of a genuinely human appearance.  And I wanted to be utterly transparent, to approach my art with an uncommon, uninhibited candidness.  The idea was that I wouldn’t hide anything: my fans would always know me as a person, know where my songs came from, what necessitated them and what they said.

That’s starting to change, but not because of image – because of words.

Some of the most profound music I’ve ever listened to has also been the most metaphorical and unexplainable.  By being elusive and obscure, it has allowed me to impose my own experiences onto it, relate it to my life and form it to my needs.  To me, art that allows people to do that – to apply it and make it their own – is the art I want to produce.  If I write about the way it felt to leave London, and it gets you through a tough breakup, it’s not some betrayal of the song’s essence.  It’s how it should be.

My music is yours, and there’s more on the way.

HWN

HWN

Relatively soon, there will be an unassuming man wandering the Lifest grounds with flyers that look an awful lot like this:

Click this link for your free track: http://bit.ly/oKBvdj

Until July 11th,

HWN

An important disclaimer is that I am the opposite of articulate right now.  Finals are looming, and as the Brits would say, I’m utterly “knackered.”  Think less refined and more journal-like.

This is the part where I admit how awful I am at taking my own advice.  I’ve written repeatedly in this blog about how important it is to embrace the present and let go of the other tenses, but these past couple weeks have rendered that impossible for me.  My inevitable return to the States has dawned on me, and quite suddenly I’ve understood that I’m not ready for it.  That’s a weighty thing for me to say, considering all the friends and family I have back home, but there are two truths here: 1.) I hate having loose ends, 2.) I have many of them here.  Of course, the best medicine is community, so I’m throwing it out to the fans and sharing some new words with y’all.

Timing is a funny thing, isn’t it?  I say this because when I think about circumstances, I literally end up laughing about how unfair they can be.  Here I am, where everything is coming together in all the most perfect ways, and in three weeks, I get on a plane and leave it all.  I can’t go into great detail, but I can say that May 29th will be a profoundly difficult day.  Consequently, there’s a good chance I’ll have the first full-length HWN album completely written by the time I get back.  Recording is another story, but rest assured there will be no shortage of lyrical inspiration.

Anyone who’s studied poetry even briefly will understand that I am a Romantic.  I think lofty ideas are within reach, and I will fight like hell to make them happen.  Essentially, I see obstacles as a reason to go buy better knee pads.  The beautiful thing about human romance, though, is this: when someone else is involved, you can watch all your own plans go straight to hell, because you can’t make decisions for them.  That is a painful, powerful lesson, and it took a trip to England to teach me that.  My great piece of advice is this: by placing your trust in another, and risking your Self, you will get hurt more times than you can count.  Do it anyway.

HWN

Timing
Little boats weaving, a lake in my mind
In the silence I never knew.
Threads of a hidden, subconscious design
And the courage to see them through.

4,000 miles’ worth of all that I’ve been
And I thought I could leave it there,
But failed resolutions are too much to fend off
When memories don’t repair.

“I’m helpless but hopeful,” she said as I stared,
“But I guess that is all we can be.”
I learned then that timing will never be fair,
And that distance will always deceive.

So this is me,
Sweeping your history
From under your feet.

Little boats weaving, a lake in my mind
In the chances I never knew.
Threads of a quietly careful design
Where I’ll always have room for you.

What is it about music that forges an immediate bond between strangers?  What is it about a song that makes us sit in our cars at 1 AM and think to ourselves, I will marry whoever wrote this?

For me, it’s honesty.  I remember the first time I heard a record by The Hush Sound (Like Vines), and I realized somewhere between the groove on “A Dark Congregation” and the poetic arrest of “You Are the Moon” that I should probably fly my golden minivan down to Sherburne’s in Stillwater, buy Greta Salpeter a rock the size of a small planet, and propose to her without introducing myself.

It’s the same reason that Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago puts me in a funk for nights at a time, that Eminem’s yeah-I-went-there subject matter gives me the greatest level of respect for him, and that Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak is one of the most heroic releases of our time.  There is something about a person willingly pouring out their soul.  It is inevitably relatable, and it is my lyrical ambition.

I have discovered over the past few years that honesty is actually the least forcible thing I can do: it happens when I’m not analyzing; when I’m not striving to make some sort of conscious impression.  After releasing Left, I found myself facing an unbearable writer’s block for months, supplemented by difficulties to reconcile with the content on the EP.  But after about five months, a funny thing happened – one night, I sat down in my basement and wrote a new song in one go.  No edits, no thought, just the “emotional necessity” that was responsible for Denuo back in 2007.

In July 2010, I spent a day at August Ogren-Dehn’s Barn House Productions in Mahtomedi recording the song, then posted a video of our session on YouTube:

Almost a year passed, I came to England to study, quietly penned a lot of new material, and put The Ruse mostly out of my mind.  Then one day about a week ago, I started getting some interesting Twitter mentions.  To make a long story short, there was an outpouring of support for The Ruse from people saying that they had unintentionally stumbled across the video while looking up someone named Stana Katic.  My first thought was, who the hell is Stana Katic?  Luckily, I was born into the Google era, and I quickly discovered that Stana Katic is none other than the star actress of ABC’s Castle, where she plays Detective Kate Beckett alongside Richard Castle (played by Nathan Fillion).  I had to laugh when I figured this out, because my outspokenly nerdy buddies at Luther College are huge fans of Fillion from his work as Captain Malcolm Reynolds on Joss Whedon’s Firefly.

Next Question: Why the hell would a celebrity actress be generating publicity for one of my songs?

To answer this, I did what any respectable modern citizen would do; I combed through her Tweets like an identity thief in a back-alley dumpster.  Ultimately, I found out that a fan had compiled a Castle video montage in celebration of the show’s 2nd anniversary, which she had selected as “Fan Video of the Week” on her fan site.  The fan – wonderful person that they are (who are you?!) – used The Ruse as the featured song.  4,000+ views later, people were taking notice and giving me some very encouraging feedback.  Watch the fan video below:

There is nothing I love more as a musician than my fans.  They are responsible for giving me something to do, and letting me know that it all counts for something.  It is in the aftermath of that video, and of the subsequent feedback from it, that I decided to have The Ruse properly mixed & mastered, and released as a single.  Click the link below to visit the Official Online Store.  It has to be processed by iTunes before it will be available there, but I will post updates on Facebook and Twitter as soon as that happens.  Thank you, as always, for your continued support.  Keep listening.

HWN Official Online Store