Welcome to the latest edition of the Fog Chaser newsletter—sharing a new original instrumental song & photos every month. (previous issue: night sketch)
🎵 Speaking of music: A song I shared here last year, Downstream, will be released on streaming platforms on 10/2. If you have 30 seconds, pre-saving it on Spotify helps boost the release and support my work. Thank you!
The best of the summer gone,
and the new fall not yet born.
The odd uneven time.
- Sylvia Plath
🎵 This month’s piece is in E major.1
I've been carrying this song for over a decade, shelving and reworking it countless times. I wrote dozens of accompanying parts, sections with lyrics and vocals, elaborate arrangements—but could never figure out how I wanted it to go. Like so many creative projects, it became too precious in my head to ever feel like I could finish it.
But sometimes the best and most honest thing you can do is let something be what it wants to be. So here it is in its simplest form—just an A and B section in equal measure.2
In a couple of weeks we’ll experience the September equinox—one of only two times each year when the earth is tilted neither toward nor away from the sun. I’m no astronomer, but I like to think of these biannual shifts as brief moments of global equilibrium. Day and night all around the world will be more or less the same length before we tip into our respective seasonal shifts.
There’s something fitting about releasing this long-held song now, in equal parts like the balanced day and night of the approaching equinox. A moment of pause before we move toward new things.
For more guitar songs from this volume, see through the tall grass and a bright & shining place.
📷 This month’s photos were taken in the desert of West Texas.3
I invite you to sit with this month’s song, photos, and poem and make them a small part of your day, whether that’s your morning ritual, afternoon break, or your evening wind-down.
As always, if you feel like it, let me know what you think in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.
Thank you for being here.
Spotify • Apple Music • Bandcamp • YouTube • Website
Complex Autumnal
by Carolyn Kizer4
I let the smoke out of the windows
And lift the hair from my ears.
A season of birds and reaping,
A level of light appears.Sun lies in urns on the terrace
Like the cat on the chimney. Near
Fall stirs the curtains, narrowRibbons of air nip my fingers.
Warm under foot, the carpet
Reminds my skin I am here.All things begin together:
Weather and love. The ear
Hears the earth turn; we make an adjustmentTo that motion: the dip of the sphere
Into autumn, and rustling music
As the leaves are shaken away...All things begin together,
Here, as I shake, at the day’s
Beginning, with pleasure and fear,Numb with night's dip and turning
When I weathered love-in-a-sphere,
Like the siamese cat on the chimneyMysterious, now, as a vessel,
An ark, or a precious container,
She is smoothing, sunning her fur.I stand at the window and shiver
As the smoke wreathes out of my hair.
All things begin together:Weather and love and fear
And the color of leaves, and pleasure.
The waxwings come to the ash trees
That rustle until they are bare.The birds will wing from the weather,
While I stand, still as the harvest,
With the sound of the fall in the air.
🎵 Official releases:
Downstream releases on 10/2—help me out and pre-save it on Spotify.
📺 YouTube updates:
I've been building out the FC YouTube channel with instrumental playlists of my work, like Creative Flow and Deep Focus, and extended versions of certain songs, like Foreign Morning. Upcoming additions include some “pomodoro” length playlists to help with shorter spurts of focus. Subscribe to the channel for these listening experiences you won't find anywhere else.
🔒 For paid subscribers:
Wed., September 27: the wellspring, a monthly round-up of my inspirations (check out last month’s issue)
I’ll definitely record and share a performance video of this song at some point.
Until then, I’ll see you in the comments.
equinox / Written, performed, and produced by Fog Chaser.
As a reminder: while some of my songs are eventually released on streaming platforms, others are not. Either way, all of my songs are shared here with you first.
Theory notes: This song doesn’t have many deviations from the key that it’s in (E Major), but in the song’s B part, I flatten the seventh scale degree at one point (dropping the key’s D-sharp to a D-natural) to create a B minor chord instead of a B major chord. Doing so, I dip into the Mixolydian mode (where a major scale’s seventh is lowered a half step). This creates a quick little flavor change before I return to a B major chord a couple of bars later on the B part’s descent. Questions? Corrections? Let me know!
Shot on DSLR / Big Bend National Park, Texas, USA.
Source: Poetry (January 1956)
