Five years gone. It's here.

I couldn't take the delay anymore.

After releasing four new tracks in succession on YouTube and then Bandcamp under my "one song at a time" strategy, I finished the mixes to a level I can live with and sent the whole thing off into the wild a couple days ago.

Here it is, after five years, the new Council of One album Profit and Loss!

A lot changes in five years, even if the music comes along slowly. Here are the phases this project went through:

• Avant-garde music featuring instruments all playing at different tempos. This lasted one song in 2012 ("Random Events", the first song finished), and into a little bit of the next ("Profit and Loss").
• Prog-pop tunefulness featuring my new Jeff Beck-ish legato melody style as it first developed in 2013-14. A number of songs feature this, even as the project entered different phases.
• Songs about my sons. Fatherhood has given me much less time and energy to work on music than before, but it has also given me new creative insights. "Elder Son" and "Cameron's Song" have musical themes directly tied to my sons. For most of 2015, this is what I was hoping the entire album would be. But then...
• Loved ones started passing away all too frequently during 2015. I realized that I needed to have tributes to some of these people (and a dog) on the album.

As I was working on "Cameron's Song" for my younger son in 2015-16, I began working on songs devoted to those I lost. A very odd emotional process.

So, you'd think it would be a really melancholy bummer of an album, right? Not at all. I wanted my tributes to the deceased to be celebrations of their lives and how I perceived them.

The central concept is that the "Profit" songs about my sons are the "deep" slower ones, while the "Loss" songs are more upbeat and energetic.

Take a listen and let me know what you think!