They say time is the heal­er, but, you know, it tends to take a while. For me, the bet­ter option has always been music, which I guess is why late in the sum­mer of last year when I was feel­ing, say, less than my best, I decid­ed I’d make a record.

I picked up my lap­top and wrote an email to a few of my favorite peo­ple, musi­cians I loved play­ing with but did­n’t get to very often: Cody McK­in­ney, a bass play­er whose melod­ic sense is sec­ond-to-none; Jere­my Ylvisak­er, the epit­o­me of a fear­less musi­cian; DeVon Gray, the truest stew­ard of art I know. I did­n’t have an idea of what music to play, so I pro­posed some­thing I rarely get to do — gath­er­ing for a ​“writ­ing” ses­sion of impro­vi­sa­tion and con­struct­ing an album based on the themes we invent. I hit ​“send” and waited.

Well, those suck­ers all agreed it was a grand idea, so a few months lat­er we hauled our favorite instru­ments to The Pearl Record­ing Stu­dio here in Min­neapo­lis and two days after that I was sift­ing through hours of music. The biggest sur­prise for me was­n’t how much fun the ses­sion was, or how much mate­r­i­al we record­ed — lots and lots, respec­tive­ly — but how com­plete most of it sound­ed. I don’t know what mol­e­cules fall into place to have a time­line of music con­sid­ered a song, ver­sus a stream of sil­ly ideas, but turns out there’s a sur­pris­ing amount of both hid­ing in here.

So! Sched­ules and mon­ey being what they are, it’s tak­ing a lit­tle time to record the ini­tial con­cept of com­posed music born from the ther­a­py of impro­vi­sa­tion. In the mean­time, though, we’re releas­ing the lit­tle gems from our ini­tial record­ing ses­sions as we find them. Here’s our first, accom­pa­nied by a sweet and deter­mined anthro­po­mor­phic snow­man. It’s apro­pos for the sea­son! It also makes me feel bet­ter about the future somehow.