The music came first.
I Am What Remains was already becoming a collection before I ever knew what its visual world would look like.
The songs existed first.
The feelings were already there. The stories were already being told. The album was beginning to take shape.
And then came summer.
I took these photographs simply because I was living my life.
A trip to North Carolina.
A bonfire at a local farm owned by the family of one of my husband's coworkers.
A weekend spent camping at a Viking festival in Ohio.
Nothing about those moments was planned around the album.
I wasn't thinking about album artwork.
I wasn't searching for photographs to match songs.
I was just there.
And I happened to have a camera on my phone.
There were skies I wanted to remember.
Water.
Flowers.
Sunsets.
Little pieces of places and moments that caught my attention long enough for me to stop and take a picture.
Only later did I begin looking at them alongside the music.
And something happened that I didn't expect.
They fit.
Not literally.
Not in the sense that a photograph was meant to illustrate a particular lyric.
It was more subtle than that.
A photograph could carry the same feeling as a song without telling the same story.
A certain horizon could feel like a particular moment in the album.
A sunset could hold the same quietness as a melody.
A flower could somehow belong beside a song about becoming.
The music gave the photographs a new context.
And the photographs gave the music somewhere visual to live.
That is how the two began speaking to one another.
The photographs weren't created for the album.
They became part of it afterward.
And I think that's what makes them feel honest.
They're not images manufactured to represent a story.
They're pieces of the life that was actually happening while the story was being made.
The songs came first.
Then life happened.
And somehow, without me planning it, life gave the songs their photographs.
So when I look through the Gallery now, I don't just see pretty pictures from a summer.
I see the places and moments that quietly became part of I Am What Remains.
North Carolina.
A farm.
A fire.
A weekend beneath the stars.
A little bit of history.
A lot of sky.
And all those small moments that I didn't know I would eventually want to keep.
Maybe that's one of the things I love most about making art.
Sometimes you don't create something with the intention of preserving a moment.
You simply notice the moment.
You save it.
And later, you realize it belonged to the story all along.
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