The first record I ever bought was Roxanne Shanté's Roxanne's Revenge. Before I was into what is widely known as "straight-ahead jazz", I was into R&B and Hip-Hop. I grew up listening to Earth, Wind, & Fire, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, and a little later on it was Prince, Anita Baker, and Run DMC. After that, it was A Tribe Called Quest, D' Angelo, and Erykah Badu, J Dilla, and Yesterday's New Quintet. What I love about these artists’ records is that they are inclusive of everything. They defy all manner of genre and are beyond categorization. A record like Thriller, for instance, encapsulates everything that happened in music up to that date and foreshadows everything that was to come. It was a definitive moment in recording history. Period. People today in Pop music haven't drifted much further away from Thriller's sound. It puts you in a space; it’s its own timepiece. Something on that record affected everybody. This is how people become fans of music in general—not just a record or an artist. All of my influences from those days and today are present on this record. You can hear shades of all of them. I wanted to create a modern R&B joint that had the flavor of what people loved in those that were recorded in the seventies and eighties—which I believe to be the greatest era overall of Pop music—but that sounded very much like now. Those songs had real melodies, bass lines, pretty chords, modulations, verses, and pre-choruses. They were more substantive than “hey baby, baby...I want to get with you...” That seems to be more of a product than music, a formula that is someone’s idea of what they think is hit worthy. They’re only trying to appeal to what they believe is the base level consumer, as opposed to trying to create art. They’re underestimating the public; playing down to the people, instead of crafting something that elevates and stimulates the mind. The idea of this album is to give the public something they can think about. Something provocative. Something that stimulates on more levels than just its groove. I wanted to give birth to something really beautiful. This is the focal point. I’m not trying to be innovative in the sense of being contrived or being different just for the sake of being different. This is a creation that conveys my feelings. Some of these tunes were written while I was working on my previous album Into The Blue. I knew I wasn’t vocally ready to do them at the time, but I now feel confident enough to present the material the way I intended. Incidentally, the only tune that made it out of the original batch was “Blue.” Also written at this time were “Shades of Hue,” “Indigo” and “You Are the Spark.” “Freesia” is the oldest of all of them. I wrote it years ago when I was working in New Orleans with my fusion band called Time Machine, which was a workshop for many of the ideas presented here and on my Sonic Trance release. The rest of the tunes were all written in August of 2009. The sequence of the pieces on this album is of utmost importance. I programmed them to tell a story that’s quite chronologically accurate in terms of when I wrote them as well as the story of the leading up to, the in between, and the dissolution of my marriage. There’s also a subtle biblical theme, not in a religious sense, but in terms of the story, the mythological aspect of it. The story is told in two acts. Act One is tracks 1 - 7, and Act Two is tracks 8 - 15.