I wrote most of the music and many of the lyrics to this short concept album when I was just 15 years old, slowly augmenting and refining the songs until I was about 19. The album reflects the passion, angst, and desperation of youth, as these songs are much more aggressive and “emotional” (I’ve never been a fan of the term “emo.” To me, it is a derogative term. All music is emotional, and any good song that has any value and worth should evoke emotion) than the ones that I would write later in life. Most musicians and songwriters mellow out as they get older, and I suppose that I am no different.

Though there is a real sense in which these songs feel like they were written from a distant and forgotten past, I can still relate to them on some level. And I am still immensely proud of them. They encapsulate the feelings and experiences of my childhood. I have always been profoundly aware of my finitude—haunted, even obsessed, with my frailty, my mortality, my humanity. As a child, death hung over my head like a threatening storm cloud. Ominous and troubling, I can still feel the thunder pulsating through my chest. 

As a teenager, I was preoccupied with the fickle and fleeting nature of human experience. Everything that is… will one day cease to be; everything that comes… goes away in the end; everything that is alive and breathing will soon die and breathe its last breath. Most children don’t think about these things, but I did—and I was shaken to the core, trembling in my bones, endlessly and relentlessly searching through the thoughts that were racing through my restless mind.

Like Søren Kierkegaard, the other famous “melancholy Dane,” I found an unexpected companion in the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes, an ancient piece of literature that laments the futility of human life: “vanity, vanity, all is vanity”; “everything is meaningless under the sun.” I had found a kindred spirit in a surprising place, one who put words to my feelings as a disquieted and disenchanted adolescent—especially after I lost my faith at the early and innocent age of 12. See, I didn’t just lose my faith in a crucial and dramatic moment of existential angst and dread, I lost my sense of identity and my sense of reality—my sense of meaning, purpose, and direction.

This short concept album offers a brief window into that time, a confusing and mercurial time in my life. The music reflects the feelings and emotions of that time. I realized then that much of life is about learning how to die, how to “say goodbye”—with integrity, with dignity. To overcome the enormous tragedy of death, one must embrace the inherent loss of death—in all of its mystery and ineffableness—in the concreteness of one’s life. One must live as one dies, letting go and giving up all the alluring but deceiving, fulfilling but fleeting, beautiful but heartbreaking treasures of this wondrous and awe-inspiring world, a world that slips through the cracks between our feeble fingers like grains of sand slip through the crevice of the hour glass. For,

“all people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.”

- 1 Peter 1:24

This little three-song album is not without hope, however. Even in the midst of the existential dread and nihilistic angst of my youth, I was never without hope—a flickering and fading but enduring and persisting hope that would anticipate my eventual return to faith at the age of 20. This auspicious return didn’t just represent the rebirth of a deceased faith, but the rebirth of a divinely-imparted and Spirit-inspired identity, meaning, purpose, and telos that had been lost, but now was found. Resurrection: life sprouting forth from death, a flower emerging from the grave plot. 

This faith, renewed and reborn, represented the consummation of a youthful, naive, provisional, and even conflicting hope. For this faith was grounded in the hope of Transcendence, in a transcendent and resilient Spirit, the Spirit of novelty, the Power of the future—a future where the dead are raised, where hope shines through and triumphs over despair, where pain and angst and dread are no more.

- Ryan Ragozine