I created The Impulse Powers to break a pattern I had clung to since I first started writing poems and music. For that decade-plus before, everything creative I did circled pain, sadness, depression, and the like. I don’t say that to dismiss it. It was what I needed then, and it helped support me through a lot.

But around 2010 I started to feel like I was wringing my hands incessantly (I actually even had a different, short-lived, project called Wring around that time!). Even after I had written about something I was struggling with, the next song would be a new formulation of that same pain. At a certain point that seemed like the easy option.

It seemed like a much bigger challenge would be to find some, even tiny, light in that pain, and make that my focus. So I’ve always tried to keep that as the target in Impulse Powers material. The bigger the trauma, the bigger the victory to mine out something good in it. Like digging in my memory of places, or friendships, or past loves, with The Impulse Powers I dig into, and dig out, pain.

I really have to give a lot of credit to the impact of the music of Lou Barlow, a song-writer that I had discovered back when I was in school, in guiding me to this way of thinking. I’ve learned so much from so many musicians of course, but listening to Lou taught me something unlike all the others: The value in making creative work about digging deeply, relentlessly into past pain (something I once heard him call “picking at sores”).

As I pushed deeper and deeper into all that, looking for something unexpected, I found that little light, and it has turned out to be something I would never have dreamed could be there: Fight. Getting up again. Resilience. Hope even. I’ll put all that under the word “Glimpses”.  

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Some things I’ve seen as I’ve searched for glimpses…