Clouds O'er Fields of May

An Album

For as long as I can remember, I've always loved the rain. There was something so captivating in the way it made me feel so small, and yet so comfortably so. You yield to the in rain some ways...what else is there to do? In a world where we're always fighting to control the next moment of our lives, there's something incredibly freeing in a force that is so immeasurably beyond you.

As a young man, I've spent much of my life at war with the world beyond me. Trying to control my destiny, as all young men do. But perhaps for as many years as I've spent as a warrior, even more I've spent as a poet, true to my namesake.

And the life of a poet is not one of control, primarily. It's not a quest for power over the material world. In many ways, the life of a poet is marked by a willingness to tarry alongside something long before the need to understand it fully. A staying of the hand that allows one to experience something before merely grasping it for only part of what it may be. An openness to the genuine presence of an other. Not a war. But a dance.

I think the weather calls out the poet in me. Because only a fool would try to control the weather. I say as someone who's tried. In time, and with sufficient wisdom, one learns to come into relationship with the weather. To dance, as it were.

In our culture, the rain maintains a rather gloomy reputation. One I've found to be rather unidimensional, and reminiscent of our own cultural obsession with convenience at the expense of all else.

I don't thinks it's ever entirely for one to say what an album is "about" in any final sense. But in some ways, this album is in part a love letter to the rain that I have come to know in just 25 short years and a lifetime. And it's not just the rain that we blame for our muddy shoes and cancelled plans.

Because sometimes it needs to rain. Sometimes you need the rain. Sometimes, something bigger than you needs the rain. Sometimes it's going to rain whether you like it or not. And sometimes it's not. Sometimes the rain is what you need, and you just don't want the things you need.

But there's something beautiful about a sky that is always above you and always beyond you, and always beyond your control. Because the things in life that are under your control are never wholly that way in the end.

In the end, there's something deep and terrifying, something awful and mysterious, something horrible and heart-wrenching...

but something beautiful.

About learning to yield everything that you are to everything that is beyond you, and daring to find meaning in the in-between.

To quote the song for which the album gets its name, "Her sweet smile has brought me the rain, like Clouds O'er Fields of May."

A Word of Thanks

In some ways this album is a telling of my story, through the songs I've written along the way. But maybe it's your story too. I may have put these words to pen, but in some sense these songs are not wholly mine. What is art apart from we who cherish it? What does it mean in the absence of we who find meaning in it? Even if you've just taken the time read here today, thank you for being a part of my story. And thank you for letting me be a part of yours.

As for the album, it's currently underway. Ahead of its official release I'll be sharing the songs through [untitled], along with lyrics, production notes, and the stories behind the songs. As the album begins to take shape, it will all be shared here.

To adventure.

And a life well-lived,

— David Kennedy