Album #1
Dark Joy
The concept of Dark Joy began years ago. But it came to life on my last trip to Ankara, Türkiye. Specifically, I was inspired by the beauty of the running route I found that took me to the peak of a nearby mountain each day. Leaving a complex foreign family dynamic every afternoon was necessarily liberating. Passing through apartment bloks, corner stores, neighborhood parks, staircases, and robust scenery that led me to the summit of a mountain overlooking the city gave me just the undeniable inspiration I needed to write this album.
Every passing day, the same routine played out. However, the places stopped being scenery. They became metaphors. Every ordinary landmark reflected something happening internally. Relationships. Family. Distance. Growth. Travel. Uncertainty. Responsibility. Life. And a full reflection of how I got there.
This album explores the strange truth that difficult seasons often become our favorite memories. Not because they were easy. But because they changed us for the better.
Tracks
01Blocks
In Turkiye, apartment buildings are called bloks. We stayed in Blok A4, and I liked the sound of it enough to keep saying it. But the blocks I mean are the other kind, the ones people put between each other without always meaning to. Some you find a way around. Some you don’t.
02Trails
My run every day ended at the bottom of a mountain with more trails than I could count. I never knew where the one at the top led. I took it anyway, trusting I’d enjoy getting lost long enough to find my way back.
03Stores
We went to the mall in Turkiye more than I expected to. The layout was familiar, the reason people go was familiar, but everything on the shelves was new to me: the textures, the styles, the brands I’d never seen stocked next to the ones I had.
04Parks
We’re at a park almost every day, whether we’re home or somewhere else entirely. It’s a habit by now, maybe a tradition. This one is built to sound like it: birds, vendors, a swing set still going after we’ve left.
05Balconies
Most life there happens indoors, in high rises, unless you’re headed to a park or a market. The balcony is where you go instead, for air. Most of these songs started out on one, some evening, watching a city I didn’t grow up in.
06Celebrations
We celebrated my daughter’s birthday on the other side of the world, and everyone came. Every age, every kind of person, in more than one language, related only by the excuse of the day. I spent most of it watching her face instead of the party.
07Gates
Getting there took thirty two hours. A delay, a cancellation, luggage that didn’t make the connection, one gate after another. We decided early to call it an adventure instead of a disaster. Looking back, it was.
08Differences
This is the darkest song here, on purpose. Our lives and our family’s turned out to be different enough to strain what held us together, more than I expected. Difference is supposed to be the beautiful part of being human. Sometimes it’s just the hard part, and this song is what was left once I let it go instead of holding onto it.
09Floors
We lived under someone else’s footsteps for a season, an apartment building where you hear every step, every dragged chair, none of it in your control. This one is paced like that. Patience, learned from a ceiling.
10Homes
Being back where my wife grew up is its own kind of homesick, nostalgia and memory and old weight that were never mine to carry. It settled something in me anyway. It doesn’t matter how far we go or how long we’re gone. Home is just wherever we all are.
11Stares
Speak your own language somewhere else and people look. I noticed it more than I expected to, at the market, on the street, most places we went. Mostly it’s curiosity, not unkindness. Some days it feels like living on a small stage.
12Summits
This is the top of the mountain, literally, the run I made almost every day and the last one before everything changed. Our differences ended that trip early. We took another one instead, which might be the thing we’re actually best at by now. I wanted this one to end the album with a little Turkish in it.