I’m struck by the message implicit in sand painting, where Buddhist and Navajo sand painters create beautiful, temporary works of art that get swept away upon completion.

I thought about how you’d apply the sand-painting idea to music. Tricky: Since music exists only in the air and in our memories, it ceases to be only when it’s no longer remembered by anyone. Erasing a recording has no bearing on the existence of the song it contains. And so these songs’ll continue to exist on phones, hard drives, websites, and in our minds for as long as we can recall them.

A Note from the Halfway Point:

I’m writing this on October 9, 2008. In waking up this morning, I passed a strange threshold: I’ve now lived longer than my father. This day is the first one I get to have that he didn’t. And all of the rest from now on.

Sad yesterday I kept thinking what it must have been like for him, now that I could feel how it felt to be this exact age, his dying age. Today I’m not sure what to feel. Certainly I’ve won something—time—that he didn’t, and I need to remember to be grateful for that, and happy about it. He’d be happy about it. But it’s an odd, unsettling place to be. We’re about to go out to dinner, and it’s not quite celebratory that I’m feeling.

It’s therefore an appropriate time to explain the reasons for creating Sand Paintings. It’s also now just a few days past production’s halfway point. I started the album on the night of March 27 this year (my 56th birthday), and intend to have it recorded by next March 27.

As you can now guess, the album has something to do with my dad, more specifically with coming to some kind of mature—peaceful if possible—terms with my own mortality. I can’t imagine spending the rest of my (hopefully long) life as troubled with this as I have been. I’m trying to work it out through these songs. Maybe I am; it’s hard to tell so far. I do find myself clinging to some of the songs when it gets dark or deficient in here. Other times, as George Harrison put it, “my life is really quite serene.”

I still have almost six months to go.

Finished: