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Volume IV

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vol. IV, no. 11 • desert songs

Fog Chaser

Mar 19, 2026

Welcome to the latest edition of the Fog Chaser newsletter—sharing a new original instrumental song & photos every month. (previous issue: what’s in front of me)

Hi there friends. How are you? Are you holding up okay? How is it March? What is happening? You know something, my kid turns 3 next month. Holy moly.

Anyway, turns out that this is the eleventh song of Volume IV, which means we’re very close to the end of this chapter. Four years of sharing a new piece of music with you every month — the songs, the photos, the poems and quiet mornings spent writing to you from wherever I happened to be.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. What this project has given me. Where it started — someone trying to heal after two brain injuries and learning how to compose music, sharing what I learned with you along the way — and where it’s taken me.

Next month, two films I scored are premiering at festivals. I’m collaborating with writers and other artists. I couldn’t have imagined any of this when I sent that first newsletter in 2021.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself — I’ll share some more reflections next month. But I wanted to say: thank you. For being here. For listening. For making this quiet little corner of the internet feel like it matters. It has mattered so much to me, and I hope it has for you, too.

🎵 This month’s piece is in F-sharp major.1

This month’s song started differently than anything I’ve shared with you before.

I was collaborating with the writer Alex Elle — she had written a poem called “Choose Yourself, Again” and we decided to pair it with music. But rather than composing something separately and layering it in later, I sat down at the piano, pressed play on her reading of the poem, and just responded — to her cadence, her pauses, her emotion. I wrote as I listened.

What came out has these loose ebbs and flows that I never would have arrived at on my own. The structure follows her voice and words even though you won’t hear it here — this is the instrumental version, the music on its own. But her presence is all over it.

The whole process felt less like composing and more like painting — I had a palette of samples and sounds, and I’d add a texture here, a color there, the way you might with a brush or a palette knife. Piano as the foundation, with these little elements appearing and disappearing around it.

It’s a different way of working for me, and I loved it. Alex and I are planning to do more of these together down the road.

You can read Alex’s poem below, and hear the full poem + music version on her Substack here. Her new book, The Company We Keep, is also available for pre-order here.

Gratitude Journal

Poem 02: Choose Yourself, Again

Words cannot express how excited I am to share this piece. I collaborated with Matt of FogChaser to bring more life to this poem. Matt is an American composer, songwriter, and producer. Inspired by the forests and mountains of his home in the Pacific Northwest, Fog Chaser writes cinematic, neoclassical music that incorporates acoustic, orchestral, and electronic…

a year ago · 504 likes · 64 comments · Alex Elle and Fog Chaser

📷 This month’s photo was taken in Big Bend National Park.2

Choose Yourself, Again

by Alex Elle3

One day, I woke up singing a song I didn’t know.
Saying prayer I never prayed.
Holding seeds I’d never sown.
Yet—the lyrics rolled off my lips like love,
like my mother tongue.
Like the first language I’d ever known.
It was all so strange.
Like a shadow in the sunlight,
like having two left feet...
Maybe the ancestors taught me in my dreams, I thought.
Because my voice wasn’t mine. I felt unfamiliar to myself.
My heart was heavy with a new type of wisdom—the wisdom of women
who chose themselves long before we knew how to call it by name.

Commit to yourself, I hummed—
the mantra slipping from my lips like honey from a spoon.
Slow. Heavy. Impatient on its descent.
Commit to the soft & sacred work of your joy.
It is your birthright to hold yourself,
to cradle who you’ve always wanted to be.
You are worthy of your own protection,
even in the face of your own rejection.

Stop looking away.
Learn to take yourself by the hand.
You aren’t out of reach.
Your healing is the rebellion.
Your joy is the freedom song.
You deserve every piece of liberation
that you ache for.
What you’re worth is no longer up for debate.
Carve your way out of your old ways.
Who you used to be is no longer a haven or a home.
Stand in the sunlight of your becoming,
where shadows dissolve, and your truth remains.
Hold every ache tenderly, but don’t let it anchor you.
Sow the seeds you hold.
Walk forward—one audacious step, then another.
This is the season of your blooming.
This is the season you claim as your own.
May it be so,
and may it always be.
One day, I woke up singing a song I didn’t know.
Saying prayer I never prayed.
Holding seeds I’d never sown.
Yet—the lyrics rolled off my lips like love,
like my mother tongue.
Like the first language I’d ever known.
It was all so strange.

To choose myself yet again.

I invite you to sit with this month’s song, photo, 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.

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Choose Yourself, Again

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