The Kindlings Muse

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• The Kindlings Muse: https://www.dickstaub.com/kindlings/
• St.Aub: https://www.dickstaub.com/episodes/
• Dick Staub Show Interviews: https://www.dickstaub.com/archive/

SPINNING ON A COSMIC DIME releases exclusively on Bandcamp tomorrow (https://jeffjohnsonarkmusic.bandcamp.com/album/spinning-on-a-cosmic-dime) and on all other music service sites on 9/6/24. The title for Phil’s and my new album comes from a moment a year and a half ago when my family found itself together at Seattle Children’s Hospital where my two year old granddaughter had been admitted for what turned out to be a delicate brain surgery. The procedure was successfully completed and after a week recovering with the good and gifted people at Children’s, our granddaughter came home.

I was speaking to a friend updating them on this situation when I said, “sometimes our lives just seem like we’re spinning around on a cosmic dime.” In other words, life is fragile and most of the time we have no sense of it until something like this turns our lives upside down.

Phil and I don’t physically work together in a studio when we record our music. He lives in Nashville and I live on Camano Island. We send tracks back and forth to one another. It’s an unusual way to work but the process has served us well over the years. This will be our fifth studio album and on past projects we have often begun with a general concept that serves to be an inspirational “backdrop” to what we’re working on. Past concepts/inspirations have included the Texas Frio River, church caves in Cappadocia, Turkey and the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, Italy.

Yet this new music began happening so quickly that the only “concept” that I could think of to work with was the idea of “wonder.” Wonder, of course, isn’t a bad concept to have for any creative effort. You might even say that ALL creative inspiration begins with some sense of wonder! It was in the midst of recording the new music that this idea of “spinning on a cosmic dime” kept coming to my mind.

If we were to be honest with ourselves, life really is pretty precarious. And when you consider this “dime” of an earth spinning around a sun – one star of 100 billion stars in our own galaxy and 200 billion trillion in the entire universe – your life can feel pretty darn insignificant. Yet, wonder changes all of that because wonder is a way of looking at this vast creation and seeing things that make your life and everyone else’s life significant. Then, add the idea that God, the creator of the universe, became a man who dwelt among us and suddenly this spinning dime is like a cosmic carousel spinning around this big, beautiful universe!

Enjoy the new music,
Jeff