Looking For Paradise (7:54)

bowed device, vocal, 7-string electric, 12-string acoustic

With “Looking For Paradise”, I was partially going after a musical portrait of the “Shangri-La” idea, the place hidden from the world where life is a tranquil paradise. Shangri-La is fictional, of course, but Hilton almost certainly based it on Shambhala. But it’s not just the idea of the place itself that’s fascinating, it’s this image of searching the remote wastes of the world for it, devoting your life to it because the quest consumes you.

The music for “Looking” was intended to be very ethereal, and to bring to mind those places might go through and the quest and possibly even the finding of it. If you had to lay any ethnicity on it, it’s difficult. You can hear low voices, which sound vaguely like Russian baritone choir voices or Tibetan monks chanting. And when the 12-string comes in, it’s played with a slide and so is kind of American sounding, but the effects on it put it outside nationality and in something other than earthly, mundane space. Musically, the point is then made, this is not about anyplace in particular, but about something which, though it may seem familiar, is very much “other”. This takes the “paradise” concept out of anybody’s grasp or agenda and places it back floating in the ether where it belongs.

The “Paradise” pieces- “Looking For Paradise”, “Sanctuary”, and “Paradise Is Where You Find It”- are all linked by the recurring melody played on 12-string. There are sets of recurring themes and variations throughout the album. Most of these occur in pairs but this one, being the main one, is in thirds, to bracket the album. They were placed roughly at the beginning, middle and end. I then built the album inward from the edges by taking the pairs of related pieces and placing them as equidistant as possible from the middle. Along with the matched pairs were pieces that stood alone; these were put in to provide variety and contrast from the repetition, yet were still (I felt) consistent with the conceptual focus and mood of the album. I placed these in between pieces that were part of sets.