Photo by Alexia Webster

Welcome to Unhurried Journey!

This is a collection of songs & a story in progress, in collaboration with the magical art of Kristiana Pärn. Click on each song circle to listen, watch and create. Click on the Story page to learn more about the pieces of a story in progress.

About this album...

As I get older, I am learning to value taking my time. I embrace any opportunity to create space, listen, and appreciate this wild journey we're all on. When I do, I remember what I enjoy most about the journey: Having a conversation with a friend, face to face. Sharing a good meal. Listening to people's stories through music, art and memories. Appreciating the natural world that surrounds us.

This album is about creating space for conversations, laughter, reflections, and memories. Let’s soak in a breeze, watch ripples across the water, study the lines of a tree, enjoy the colors of a flower, learn the melody of a bird song, revel in the mystery of our dreams, and hear the symphony of sounds that surrounds us if we stop and listen. We are constantly pushing everyday to achieve more and be more. But in that effort, let’s remind ourselves to look up, breathe, listen, and let go. This album is my dedication to the unhurried journey.

Thank you for listening!

With gratitude,

Elena

About the art: Each piece starts with a bare wood panel, complete with random grain patterns and variations. This natural surface is then saturated with paint, both accentuating and obscuring these marks, in the process creating an atmosphere that is only partly my doing. Within, entire environments are created -- trees, mountains, earth, light and air, as well as living creatures, both real and imagined. Often taking the form of the northern forests of my youth, these scenes are places of great play and whimsy, where woodland animals inhabit the waking and dreaming worlds.

- Kristiana

THANK YOU'S:

This album is also driven by collaboration, first and foremost.

One of my greatest joys in creating music for families is the opportunity to work collaboratively with artists whom I admire and enjoy. The album itself is inspired by artist Kristiana Pärn, my collaborator on Rabbit Days and Dumplings. Upon seeing her art, and the magical worlds she creates through image, I immediately wanted to create a musical journey to go alongside them.

Each song is also a deep musical collaboration. They feature musicians and dear friends from Korea, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, China, Mexico and the US. As always, I treasure the opportunity to learn songs from these friends, and to bring them into new songs of my own. In learning these songs, I learned histories, cultures, languages, personal memories. In building new songs, I learned something new about myself. As Dan Zanes said to me in the earliest days of creating Rabbit Days and Dumplings, “The more I know about myself, and where I come from, the more I can share with you. And the more you know about yourself, the more you can share with me.” The more we share with one another, the more we can appreciate our shared and collective humanity.