Something that is undeniably significant about the first three tracks here is how they connect me to my friend Sarah. These tracks are improvisations they recorded in their senior BFA exhibition, Healing Vision No. 1, which greatly informed the music that occurred. The space was a very raw and personal retrospective they had put together as a way to express the painful experience of unpacking the subtleties of trauma. Sculptures, installations, weavings, and video projections filled up the large and reverberant concrete room. While the courageous and vulnerable declaration of very personalized suffering was present, the exhibition was also a profound love letter to the self; a comforting hand to grasp onto that leads one out of the cyclical loops of trauma and onto a compassionate and illuminated pathway that may look a little something like Rainbow Road from Mario Kart.

Healing Vision No.1 can be found here:
sarahjferraro.portfoliobox.net

These recordings were made In Sarah’s last week before moving out of Eau Claire because it was their last year (I still had one year left of school). It was also spring of 2020 at this point, so we made a huge deal out of staying 6 feet apart, which was not difficult in the spacious Foster Gallery at UW Eau Claire. These are songs of temporary farewell between the two of us that functioned as a bittersweet ritual similar to Roy Rodgers’ and Dale Evans’ “Happy Trails”.

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent humanity, the mark of cruelty”
-James Baldwin

Talking to any human who has been alive over the past 2 or so years it is obvious that there is a unique flavor of apathy in the air. For understandable reasons, many of us have grown numb and jaded. How can we stubbornly ignore Baldwin’s point and grow into the embarrassingly passionate beings that many of us are destined to be? By shedding light on this moment of vulnerability from the start of these dark times that we entered, I hope to somehow break free from this hellish default state and encourage others to do the same.

“Greed and generosity are evidence of love.
If you can’t see love itself,
See the results.
If you can’t find love-colors in anything,
Look for the pale, tired face of a lover.”
-Rumi