New Year’s 17

This one was never supposed to be anything.

Late December of 2016, everything quiet, that strange suspended stretch of days between the holidays and the new year when nobody quite knows what to do with themselves. I sat down at the piano with no agenda at all and "Auld Lang Syne" showed up. It's oddly one of my favorite tunes, which I realize is an unusual thing to say about a song most people only encounter once a year at midnight while holding a drink. But there's something in that melody that gets me every time.

So I hit record and let it go wherever it wanted.

That's the entire process. Nothing was planned. Nothing was penned. No arrangement, no second take, no idea what the next bar would be until I was already playing it. Pure improvisation, start to finish, the way mind maps are supposed to work. Whatever you're hearing is exactly what happened in that room on that night.

Then I filed it away and forgot about it. It never got released, it never went online, and for years the only copy lived in my archives where nobody was ever going to hear it.

I came across it recently and thought, "why not". It's a New Year's tune sitting in a folder doing nothing. Somebody should have it.

So here it is, for better or for worse. Happy New Year, several years late.