Hi Friends, I’m excited to drop my first album this week!: You & Me, an album about love and transformation.
This album tells the story of the disintegration and transmutation of my relationship with myself and my wife Kati over a 12 month period in 2016-2017.
I called the album You & Me because almost all the songs deal with the feelings, trials and tribulations all of us experience in relationship: love, loss, fear, joy, struggle, communion, excitement and connection. Kati and I made the album art using my iPhone and some lights she had at home. It’s a raw vulnerable yet dignified cover for a set of songs that I feel exhibit the same.
You can listen to You & Me on Apple Music, Spotify, Soundcloud or anywhere else you get your music.
The best way to listen to the album is to put it on and play it from start to finish, since the songs on this album go in chronological order, and each one tells a chapter of the story.
If you want to know more about the story behind each song, see the links below as I wrote about each of them separately.
I’m proud of these songs and this album. I decided early on to constrain myself to just my voice and the guitelele so the songs themselves could shine through, (and to keep it simple for me on my first release). I hope these songs speak to you. Please let me know which ones you like best.
A huge thanks to the team that made this possible: Stef Soma at Soma Sound Studios (Bali), John McVey at Cinder Sound Studios, and David Glasser at Airshow Mastering. And thank you to Kati Bicknell, Gabe Vanaver and everyone else who supported me in this creation.
You can of course listen to the story by listening to the album, but for those of you who want more specifics, here’s the overview of You & Me:
The story starts with You Love The Hardest, a sweet tribute to the transformational power of love and relationships. I wrote You Love The Hardest in 2016 while reflecting on how far I had come as a human and a man after being in relationship with Kati for 7 years.
For most of that year Kati had been dating another man and we were experimenting with ethical non-monogamy. This was a massive learning experience for us both and I wrote One Whole Two Parts as a tribute to the learning I found in the experience.
That summer and fall I also learned about Attachment Theory, and how our upbringing can determine how we behave in relationships later in life. It explained a lot about the behavior patterns I saw between Kati and I and I wrote Push & Pull as a christmas present for Kati, exploring our dynamic and committing to change it.
By the end of 2016, Kindara, the women’s health company Kati and I started together was going through a massive transition and I decided I needed a big chunk of alone time to recalibrate and process. I decided to go to Bali for 3 months. Kati was worried that I would never come back, so I wrote Forever to reassure her (written half in Boulder and finished when I arrived in Bali).
In Bali I spent a lot of time exploring my inner reality and coming to terms with the fact that the company I had built over the last 7 years was in trouble. I wrote Absolve Me to deal with the pain and find some new hope.
Being in Bali opened my eyes to new ways of being, thinking and feeling. I saw how spending so much time in the USA had warped my view of the world. I wrote Run Away to remind me to escape Western culture and it’s focus on commodification and consumption often.
At this point my relationship with Kati took a turn. She decided she was a love addict and went into a love addiction 12 step recovery program. She requested that we not speak for a month as she went through withdrawal.
During that month I wrote three songs: I explored my relationship to commitment and wrote Commit To Love as a reminder that commitment holds its own special power, I wrote Same Eyes to come to terms with the fact that I had lived with Kati for 7 years and had somehow been unaware of her love addiction, and I wrote May I (Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud) as a mantra to sing to myself to keep building my self esteem.
When our month of silence ended our relationship exploded. Kati decided to take space and move out. My time in Bali was winding down and as I made my way back to the US I wrote Star Shine (Down The Road) to help deal with the extreme uncertainty that I felt hanging over me and us.
Once back in Boulder, I returned to our empty house. Kati and I started talking again and I wrote Wait For You to help me deal with the fact that my partner was in recovery and I didn’t know how it was going to turn out.
And the last song on the album is Same Eyes Lament (Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud), an instrumental epilogue to the story.
I’ll close with what I wrote in my blog post for Wait For You:
Looking back I have a lot of compassion for myself and for Kati. We were both doing our best given the tools and experiences we had. Neither of us wanted to fight, or control the other, or get our feelings hurt. But we couldn’t see the childhood pain running us, clouding reality.
In retrospect, it took being apart to show us what each of us were missing. It took Pia Melody’s work on love addiction and codependence to give us the map of what we were experiencing. And it took hard work for both of us to experience, befriend and transcend our pain.
And after we did the work, when we came back together, our relationship felt more whole, because I was more whole, and Kati was more whole.
And so this album is the story of young love’s maturation into adulthood. It’s a story of healing from childhood relational trauma, low self-esteem and unhealthy ways of relating. And it’s a story of separation that ultimately made possible a deeper union.
Looking back, I’ve learned that to be sustainable, love can’t be selfless, and it can’t be controlling. Love has to serve all involved. And when it does, it’s light illuminates abandoned parts of ourselves, and shows us the path towards healing. As we heal, we can love harder, and help create more healing, and love harder, so on and so forth.
Love heals. And healing creates more love. Again and again.
I’d be delighted if these stories and my experiences have helped you understand the love and relationships in your life in some new way, and maybe transform your world for the better.
And that my friends, brings us to the end of this chapter of the story of Kati and I. You might like to know that we just celebrated 10 years together. It’s been a beautiful, challenging and transformational decade that has made me a better man.
Thanks for being on this journey with me. I love you. Please stay tuned for what’s next.
❤️❤️❤️
Listen to You & Me on:
