When I first watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I didn’t have a lightbulb moment. I had something stranger—a sense of orientation.
Herzog’s voice drifted through the darkness, talking about Paleolithic painters using the cave’s natural forms as part of their art. How they didn’t flatten the wall into canvas—they collaborated with it. Followed its curves. Let the bulges suggest rib cages. Let the cracks become tusks. The rock was not a surface. It was active terrain.
And I thought—yes.
Not as a metaphor. Not later. Right then.
I knew there was something here—some kind of topological approach to creation, a way forward that wasn’t linear or imposed but found and felt. I just didn’t know how to use it yet. I didn’t pursue it. The idea was there like an unearthed relic: intact, recognizable—but inert. I didn’t yet understand its energy, its implications.
Back then, I was collecting scraps—riffs, broken takes, weird drum parts. But I treated them like curiosities. I wasn’t following their shapes. I was still thinking of writing as control.
Years later, I get it.
That cave wasn’t just a metaphor. It was a method.
Now, when I dig up an old drum loop or stumble across a warped track, I don’t ask: how do I fix this? I ask: what is this already suggesting? The contours come first. The rhythms I scavenge shape the riffs I build.
The real eureka moment wasn’t recent. It was dormant. What felt like delayed insight was really just a message from the past, waiting for my tools to catch up.
I didn’t change. I tuned in.
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It’s taken me years to realize that what I’m doing isn’t building songs—it’s retrieving them.
The riffs, the fragments, the found drums—they’re not ingredients. They’re evidence. Proof of a composition that already exists somewhere out ahead of me. I just access it in fragments, out of order, like a traveler with a damaged map.
Sometimes I write a riff that doesn’t fit anything. Years later, I find some drum part on a busted hard drive and realize it perfectly matches that old riff—not just rhythmically, but emotionally. It’s eerie. Like I left myself a message in a language I was still learning.
It’s not synchronicity. It’s not luck.
It’s the realization that I’m the last to know. The song knew first.
My job is to stop pushing forward and start listening sideways.
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Here’s what happens: I write riffs—just sketches. Years later, I discover drum parts on forgotten drives. I drop the riff under the rhythm, and they sync. Not close. Perfectly. Same tempo, same feel, same swing like they were waiting for each other.
And it starts to feel like something out of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Like I’m living in a Tralfamadorian moment—not writing in time, but seeing in total. The riff and the rhythm exist at once, but I’m too bound to linearity to recognize it until the pieces collide.
The song already existed, and I’m just the last one to know.
No linearity. No before or after. Just one massive, simultaneous now.
When a drum track from 2011 syncs with a guitar line from 2017 like they were born on the same breath—that’s not magic. That’s time misbehaving. That’s me stumbling into a moment of total vision, a glimpse outside the normal flow.
And for a second, I can see it all: what I was making, what I will make, what was already made.
Then the moment passes. And I’m back to chasing it again.
But now I trust that what I’m chasing is already there. I’m not inventing—I’m remembering. Piece by piece.
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Sure, live drums with a real drummer sound great. But linear time has a cost. A real drummer comes with a meter running—clock time, ego time. Often a textbook in his back pocket, whispering how it’s supposed to go. Even rhythm obeys the market.
But music doesn’t originate in clock time. That crushing pressure to execute in real time sieves out anomalies, oddities, ghosts. You can’t afford to go weird. And so you don’t.
I work with recorded time—ghosted fragments of an event that’s already happened, or hasn’t happened yet. Not improvising. Not composing. Retrieving. These old drum takes don’t charge by the hour. They’re not in it for the gig. They’ve already occurred. They’ve already failed beautifully. They’ve been waiting.
This isn’t nostalgia. This is resistance. To sterile perfection. To dead time. To algorithmic flattening. I’m not choosing a loop. I’m communing with an artifact embedded in spacetime.
The songs aren’t made. They’re remembered.
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The cave painter didn’t draw the bison in spite of the rock. The rock suggested the bison. The shape was always there, waiting for someone to look from the right angle.
So now I listen harder. That odd drag in the loop? That’s the doorway. That dropout? That’s the punctuation. That random chair creak? That’s the divining rod.
I don’t claim to know how time works. But I’ve noticed something over the years—something oddly consistent. A pattern that keeps showing up like a half-remembered chorus.
For “the song already exists and I’m just discovering it bit by bit” to be true, time would need to behave in specific ways:
Maybe time is a place, not a process. All events coexist. You’re not creating the song—you’re moving your attention through the part of spacetime where that song is already complete.
Maybe cause and effect aren’t strictly one-way. Your future self, finishing the song, sends ripples backward. That loop you couldn’t get out of your head? Maybe it caught you because your future self needed it.
Maybe songs exist outside of time altogether, in some timeless dimension. You don’t invent the song—you attune to it. Like tuning a radio.
Or maybe your unconscious mind operates on a different tempo than clocks and calendars. It lays traps and breadcrumbs across decades, recording and recombining with no regard for temporal order.
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The moment I stop forcing, the moment I release my grip on authorship—that’s when the song reveals itself.
The drums match the riff not because time is bending, but because I’ve walked this groove before, in some other iteration of now. I’m not assembling a song. I’m reassembling myself.
When the take finally clicks, when the loop snaps into place like a bone reset, that’s not discovery. That’s recognition.
The song didn’t wait. I did. For this exact collision of chance and memory.
You didn’t find it. But you wrote it. In some other when. And then, like a bison emerging from the rock, it was always there.
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