Two weeks ago I did the most hardest thing I’ve ever done as a creative person. I took music I’d made quietly, mostly alone, and put it somewhere anyone could hear it.

A friend put it perfectly the morning of the release: “So brave of you to put it out into the world.”

Honestly, it felt like standing in a doorway with the lights up, knocking, waiting to see if anyone would open up.

Many of you did. You opened the door — and then you wrote back. This letter is my attempt to tell you what that has felt like.

The album went places I never could

What I didn’t expect was where the music would end up. Over these two weeks, you’ve sent me notes from all over, and reading them back feels like watching the album take a trip without me.

Someone listened in a park in Philadelphia, in the shade on a perfect sunny day, and called it “perfection.” Another friend put it on while driving the Golden Circle in Iceland, past waterfalls and rock formations. One person had it on repeat all morning in Spain. A few of you played it on long drives — one through Moab, another for a full eighteen hours on the road. It scored lunchtime hikes, early-evening coding sessions, flights home, and more than one quiet walk.

But the ones that touched me mostwere the homes. “Listening to it with the family. My girls play piano and can appreciate your music on a different level.” “Our family is in the car listening right now. I love it.” One person wrote that their kids now request it by name — “Can you play that high school friend’s album?” — and that Teddy’s Ride is the runaway favorite of the ten-year-old demographic in their house.

I wrote a lot of this music to slow time down. Knowing it’s now part of yours is the whole thing. That’s it. That’s the prize.

What you heard in it

A handful of you, without comparing notes, reached for the same names: Keith Jarrett. George Winston. Debussy. Radiohead. Bon Iver. One friend said it best — “Hints of Keith Jarrett, but this is definitely your own.” Another described it as “peaceful, meditative, atmospheric — a hint of Radiohead on a couple tracks.”

I’ll be honest: hearing those names next to mine is dizzying. But the phrase I keep coming back to is “definitely your own.” That’s the only review I was ever really hoping for.

And then there were the responses that had nothing to do with influences at all — the ones that went straight to the body. “Goosebumps.” “Made me cry.” “Absolutely lush and gorgeous.” One person listened with their eyes closed, picturing the stream and the leaves of Big Cottonwood Canyon. Someone on a lunchtime hike said the music “made it bliss.” A fellow musician told me a single track was “a stirring song” they couldn’t shake.

You felt things. That means the music did its job.

The tracks you loved

I wasn’t going to count, but you made it impossible not to.

Cottonwood is, by a wide margin, the one you’ve claimed as your favorite — over and over. One friend said it “should be turned into a symphony performance because it’s that powerful.” It’s tied for me to a real place, and it means everything that so many of you found your own places inside it.

Teddy’s Ride is the joy-bringer (and, apparently, the ten-year-olds’ anthem). Shadow found its devoted fans — a few of you would happily listen to “a whole album of that soulful organ.” Bleed is the one that sits heaviest; people keep telling me it’s their favorite and that it makes them ache, which is exactly the contradiction I was chasing. And the title track, Waltz in the Woods, kept showing up on people’s shortlists alongside Thaw, Blue Water, Beginning, and Hope.

There’s no wrong favorite. But I love that you have one.

The breath at the end

A few of you caught something I wasn’t sure anyone would notice: the exhale at the very end of the record. “Seems intentional,” one of you wrote. “I’m not sure what to make of it.”

It was intentional. After the last note, there’s a breath — relief, release, the sound of finally letting go of something I’d held for a long time. One listener called it “a nice sigh of relief at the end of the final piece.” That’s precisely what it is. I’m glad it’s in there. I’m glad you heard it.

What this has meant to me

I’ll let you in on something. Finally having the courage to publish this music has reoriented my life more than I expected.

Over these past weeks I’ve been thinking seriously about what it would look like to give this work a much longer runway. I’ve worked incredibly hard on other projects over the years, and I’m proud of many of them — but this feels like the most honest expression of who I am, and the best thing I’ve made so far.

The quiet truth is that I’d keep doing this even if no one were listening. Crafting sound is how I slow the world down. But you are listening — in parks and on flights and on the family piano and on eighteen-hour drives — and that has turned a private practice into something I get to share. I don’t take a single message of yours for granted.

So: thank you. For pressing play. For writing back. For telling me where you were when you heard it, and what it stirred up, and which track you’ve put on repeat. You’ve been waiting to hear from me, and I’ve been a little quiet — partly because I’ve been busy in the woods, building what comes next.

There’s more coming. The poems, the stories behind each track, and a few things I’m not quite ready to name yet. Stay close.

With more gratitude than I know how to put into a paragraph,

Reese

A Waltz in the Woods is out now everywhere you stream. If a particular track found you somewhere — a drive, a hike, a hard day — I’d still love to hear about it.

teddy stuck his tongue out the window

and licked up a dust storm

it seemed satisfying

he hung his head out of the truck

gracefully

---

teddy knew something

---

tongue out the window

last minute flight to the yucatan

gas station treats

fliteboards on mountain lakes

coolers fishing the feels

the people

ass-backwards memories

all shapes and sizes

---

life doesn’t have to be dangerous to be fun

but if it’s too safe

you start feeling a lot like

something that has never been outside

---

the gentle sunset

soft fallen snow

smell of volcanic ash

salt in your hair from the ocean

you got to sit in the audience

and feel the vibrations

rumble through your chest

---

people don’t talk about the safety

they experienced all those years

they talk about the memories

and the people they made them with

---

put down your phone

and just listen

to the music of your life

---

that’s teddy’s ride

Last week someone took a picture of me sitting at my Petrof.

I looked at it again and had this immediate, uncomfortable reaction:

Who does this guy think he is?

There I was, sitting at a piano, looking serious (with the exception of my exposed Bombas). I looked like someone who might use words like artist or composer. Looking like someone who had decided he was allowed to make something creative, and ask other people to listen.

The picture was actually pretty good. I looked content, and proud.

Maybe that was part of the problem.

I asked the photographer about it later, almost like I wanted her to talk me out of it. She said it was a great picture. I agreed with her, technically. But some part of me still wanted to create distance from it.

It felt showy. I’m not that guy, I thought.

But music demands a different conversation, in a different room.

Music does not let me explain myself first. It does not let me build a case. It comes out of the body before the mind has time to make it respectable. That is part of why this project has felt so risky, and exposing.

But I know I want to give it a real shot — seriously enough that I can look back and know I did not bury something meaningful because I was embarrassed to be seen trying.

The music gave me so much, it deserves to be well represented.

And the older I get, the more suspicious I am of that voice that holds me back.

Sometimes humility is real.

But sometimes humility is just fear, dressed up as good manners.

There is a kind of false modesty that keeps some of us from telling the truth about what we love. It lets us stay safe. It protects us from criticism by making sure we never fully step forward.

I know that voice well.

It says:

Don’t make too much of this.

Don’t act like this matters.

Don’t call yourself an artist.

Don’t make people uncomfortable.

Don’t let them see how much you care.

This is not the first time I have had to walk toward something before I felt fully qualified to become it. Every meaningful threshold in my life has had some version of the same voice standing near the door.

*Who do you think you are?*

And every time, the answer has not come from arguing with the voice.

It has come from doing the work long enough that the identity slowly catches up.

When I listen to Shadow — the bright Petrof sound, the Nord B3 — it does not sound like embarrassment to me. It sounds like someone who knew what he wanted, and felt proud of it.

That is what confronting your shadow actually feels like from the inside. Not quiet. Not apologetic.

Just willing to be seen before feeling fully ready.

[image credit, my son, e. harper with permission]

it begins in fourths

there’s something about those intervals

the way it leads into these parallel chords

like parts of you

pulled apart

-----

so much of our lives

we spend inside of identities

that hold our wholeness hostage

-----

things that were protecting you

parts of yourself

you didn’t know what to do

without

-----

goodbye again

[photography by Meikel Reece]

[image credit, unknown] [my daughter, image with permission]

---

you stand over the crib

and look down

they are safe

---

i don’t know what to call that feeling

the one that moves through you

when you realize something that small

is here

alive

breathing

---

a few times

i have been lucky enough

to be in the room

when something began

i stood over something new

and felt it

---

i found the piano I used for this song in a warehouse

of pianos belonging to other people

looking to be moved

an old upright

front cover off

Just Jed put nice mics on the hammers

i played it at night

and in the morning

for a week and a half

it sounded like it was inside a wooden box

old timey warm

reminiscent of the place I grew up

when I first understood

what it meant to witness something

being born

---

I still have table and chair needs

so I gave it back

but I kept this

---

blue water

is where the album submerges again

grief behind you now

the wonder still ahead

this is the moment

between

standing over the crib

looking down

feeling that they are safe

and realizing

somewhere in that stillness

you are too

[image designed by Todd Reynolds, photography Kim Harper]

I called it flea market first

just so I wouldn’t forget it

on weekends in the summer brighton gets these vendors

knives vinyl records cutting boards freeze dried skittles clothing

the quirkiest ragtag group selling duck fat and shovels

my kids and I would hike the canyon first

then find the animals then watch the colors change

some of the best memories of my life

happened

at 8755 feet above the ocean

I’m usually the one people call

when they’re tired of holding on to it all on their own

I’ve been on both sides of that

nature is the place I go

when there’s no one to call

and I don’t want to be available

that feeling on beaches and mountain lakes

dirt trails on a mountain bike

the top of Mauna Kea

snow and fire

it’s not one specific part of the wild that’s in charge here

it’s the whole thing

trees

and mountains and rivers

they way predate us

I think about this

how conscious a tree is

what it would describe

if it could

it can’t speak

but it lives

and grows

and creates

and gives

nature just shares so much

to all of us

we don’t exist without it

track 9 is called a waltz in the woods

and it used to be called flea market

that felt right at first

and then it felt bigger than that

before I die I just wanted to say

spend time in nature

to feel it

to see it

just be there listen

hear what it wants you to know

[artwork & photography by Meikel Reece]

liam said the big dipper looked like
a french-fry fryer

sometimes late at night
while making this album
I would sit outside
and stare at the stars

knowing that some of the light I could see
had been traveling toward me
for billions of years

which means in a strange way
I was always looking backward through time

I don’t fully understand why
that space and time connection
changes me
but it does make me notice
that I’m only one piece
inside this enormous, beautiful system
of planets, and

gravity
water
oxygen
trees
animals

and consciousness
somehow we are here inside it

alive not only long enough
to experience music

but we’re here long enough to experience
relationships
memory
loss
love
beauty

Track 10 is called Beginning

and I think it came from sitting with that feeling of

wonder
interconnectedness
gratitude

and the strange ache
of knowing that everything we experience here

is incredibly temporary
and incredibly special.

Song: Blue Water, Composed, and Written by Reese Harper.

Reese Harper

The story of this album wouldn’t be complete without telling you a little bit about my mom.

It feels lucky, and more than a little fitting, that this part of the story happens to fall on Mother’s Day.

Before I understood music as something I could make, I understood it as something that filled our house.

My mom sang, danced, taught dance, and even directed some theater in our community. I was born into a home where music and movement were already in the air.

I was drawn to the piano from an early age. I liked the way sound came out of a wooden box. I loved feeling the vibrations, touching the frame, and looking inside to watch the hammers strike the strings. The piano felt very alive to me.

But learning piano before online lessons required a lot of driving. Especially when you lived in rural southeastern Idaho.

I still remember the route.

From a dirt road in Paul, Idaho, down Overland toward the outskirts of Burley. Left on Almo, then left again at the canal bank. Don’s trailer house was the last one on the left.

One trailer was full of sheet music. The other somehow held a grand piano and two uprights, which still seems impossible to me now. It was small, well kept, and completely devoted to the piano.

But when I think back on those lessons, I mostly remember the drive.

My mom never made it feel like a burden. She was upbeat. She asked about my day. She made the whole thing feel normal, even though now I can see how much time it took.

On the way home, I would try to convince her to take me to Dairy Queen. It was on the left side of the road. There was a shade tree there that felt good in the summer, the kind of shade you notice when the pavement is hot.

Mom was doing something distinct for me.

She noticed I was drawn to music, and she responded to it. She didn’t make it dramatic. She didn’t turn it into a lecture. She put it in the schedule. She made the drive. She asked about my day. She made it feel normal to care about something beautiful.

That matters to me now, because kids don’t always know which parts of themselves are going to stay with them. Sometimes an adult keeps making room for something before the child knows what it is.

Week after week, my mom made music part of the family calendar.

That sounds small until you realize how much of a life is built that way.

Looking back, I can see that she was helping me find a language.

A place to feel things.

A place to listen and be inspired.

A place to be alone without being lonely.

A place to tell the truth without having to explain it.

I think that is part of why this album feels connected to her.

When I started recording these songs, I wasn’t trying to make something impressive. I was trying to find something honest. I was trying to return to the part of me that could still feel beauty, even after life had become complicated.

The sunshine.

The wind.

The trees.

The water.

The feeling of being alive enough to notice any of it.

That feeling runs through this album. And when I trace it backward, I can see my mom there.

Not in a loud way. More like warmth under the music. A kind of steadiness. A confidence that music, movement, and feeling belong in the middle of a normal life.

That may be one of the greatest gifts she gave me.

A way of being in the world that still feels open. Still relational. Still patient. Still playful. Still willing to notice trees and water and sound and friendship and beauty.

I can hear that in the songs now.

Tenderness, yes. But not only sadness. Something familiar. Something shared. The same warmth that lived in our home made its way into me, and somehow found its way back through the piano.

So today, on Mother’s Day, I want to say thank you.

Thank you, Mom, for driving me to piano. For singing. For dancing. For noticing. For making music feel like a normal part of life.

This album came from a season of change. A need for honesty. A return to my musical identity. The mountains, the trees, the water, and the long quiet moments when music was the only thing that could say what I meant.

But it also came from you.

And I hope, when you hear it, you recognize something of yourself in the songs.

Happy Mother’s Day.

I didn’t know I was making an album.

I didn’t know I was becoming a musician. I didn’t know if I would ever find myself again.

I was just trying to feel alive for a few minutes at a time.

My marriage was falling apart, I had left my religion, and I was watching my software startup being dismantled in a forced liquidation. So many old identities had collapsed that I could no longer tell which parts of my life were still authentic. I didn’t know who I was anymore. So I drove into the mountains and started playing the piano until something true started to show up.

Day after day I would sit down at an upright piano in my cabin, turn on my phone, and play whatever came. Some days it was fear. Some days it was grief. Some days it was despair. Some days it was just the sound of the canyon working its way through me slowly enough that I could breathe again.

The ten songs on this album came from that season. Not because I set out to write them. Because I allowed them to come through and they stayed.

After 22 years of marriage, we told our kids we were getting divorced. It was not the only loss. It was just the one that made the others impossible to outrun.

A few years earlier I lost my religion.

For most of my life, my religion was more than a set of beliefs. It was a complete framework for reality, held inside a tight-knit community that had shaped me since birth. That kind of psychological loss is hard to explain unless you have lived it. It is not only a change in belief. It is a change in belonging.

It changes your calendar, your friendships, your language, your relationships, and your sense of what makes a good life. It can leave you questioning your own goodness and value, apart from the community that once helped define them.

Then came the financial loss.

I had spent nearly ten years creating and building software from scratch. I had imagined it, created it, raised money for it, fought for it, and carried it through all the hope and strain that comes with venture-backed entrepreneurship. Eventually, that business went through forced liquidation. Bankruptcy. A word I never imagined would be part of my story.

I had been better off financially ten years earlier than I was at the end of that process.

Then my divorce was final.

Four kids. Twenty-two years. A whole adult life braided together with another person. A home, a family system, a set of assumptions about the future. A lot of effort. A lot of hope. A lot of longing for what I thought the relationship might become.

And then it did not become that.

By last summer, I felt like almost every identity I had built was cracking at once. The faithful one. The married one. The provider. The founder. The practical finance guy. The person who had made responsible choices and expected those choices to eventually create safety.

Instead, I felt naked and alone. And I was starting over.

That is a hard thing to admit when you have spent your career helping other people feel grounded around money.

But that was the truth.

Most days, I was either anxious about the next step in the divorce process or heavy with a kind of depression I could not think my way out of. I knew my kids needed me. I knew they needed love, steadiness, structure, and care. But beneath that responsibility, I was struggling to feel like I mattered to anyone.

I felt hurt. Cold. Numb.

I did not know where to go with all of it.

One day in therapy, my therapist suggested that I try to find something that helped me feel emotions again.

She didn’t know much about my history with music. I had played piano since I was young. I studied music in college. But somewhere along the way, music had become something I used to do. Something from another life. A younger life. A less practical life.

She said something simple.

“You play piano, right? Maybe you should try playing again.”

I didn’t really want to play other people’s music. I wasn’t feeling covers. I didn’t even know what I would want to play.

So I just started playing. Improvising.

Not practicing. Not performing. Not trying to make something impressive.

Just playing what came to me, and through me.

At first, it was rocky. I would sit down and search for sounds that felt good in my hands. Sometimes I would land on a small phrase that broke up the pain for a few seconds. Sometimes it just gave shape to the silence in the room.

So I started recording myself.

I would turn on my phone and record for five minutes. Sometimes fifteen minutes. I did this almost every day for a while. Some days I would go on Facebook Live, set up a mic, and share a little of what I was playing with friends. I did not have a plan. I was not launching anything. I just thought, if this is helping me feel something, maybe it might help someone else feel something too.

The response surprised me.

A few people told me the music moved them. That it touched something. That it helped them think, or calm down, or feel less alone in their day.

There were no lyrics. No band. No dramatic performance.

Just me, playing piano.

And still, something was happening.

That was hard for me to accept at first. How could simple, imperfect music that was coming from the ruins of who I used to be help me? Help anyone? I did not feel worthy to be an artist. I knew how to be useful. I knew how to be practical. I knew how to be the finance person, the founder, the advisor, the responsible one. But the idea that I might share music as something meaningful felt foreign.

I had abandoned that part of myself a long time ago.

I kept driving up the canyon.

I would leave my house and drive up to my cabin. The canyon became a kind of shelter for me. I started noticing how much I depended on that drive. The mountains, the river, the trees, the stone, the light. The silence up there was not empty. It held me.

When things got hard, I would get in my car and drive.

I would sit down at the upright piano in the cabin and play whatever I felt.

Some days, what came out was fear.

Some days, it was grief.

Some days it was anger.

Some days, it was the beauty of nature doing something I could not do for myself: embracing me without judgment.

Every time I played, I felt a little more grounded.

Not fixed.

Grounded.

That distinction matters to me.

The music did not solve my life. It did not make divorce easier. It did not restore the money. It did not hand me a new identity fully formed.

It just gave me enough calm in each moment and no more.

Enough connection to not disappear.

Enough beauty to keep going.

That summer, I took a road trip with my brother, my three sisters, and all their kids. We went through Idaho, up to Redfish Lake and Stanley, then into Montana and Glacier National Park. It was one of those rare trips where the beauty feels almost too large to process.

I brought the recordings with me.

As I drove through those long stretches of mountain country, I would play the piano recordings from my phone. They calmed me. They helped me breathe. They helped me feel connected to something larger than the divorce, larger than the business failure, larger than the story I had been telling myself about what my life was supposed to become.

When I got home, I knew I could not stop.

Continue to read Part 2.

When I got home from that road trip, I knew something had shifted.

But knowing something has shifted and knowing what to do with it are two different things.

The idea of actually making an album felt like a long shot. I was not a recording artist. I had no producer, no budget, no plan. I was a finance guy. A founder. A father in the middle of a divorce. The idea that I might step into the identity of musician — that I might take these raw, private recordings and shape them into something real and shareable — felt like it would be too simplistic, too unworthy of sharing.

And that fear, I realized, was exactly the thing I had to surrender.

Surrender had become a word I was learning to take seriously. Not as passivity. Not as giving up. But as the specific courage it takes to stop forcing life into the shape you think it should have, and instead let it become what it is trying to become.

The piano had already been teaching me this. The best moments in those sessions never came from effort. They came from letting go of effort. From listening instead of controlling.

I decided to apply that same principle to the album itself.

From July through August, I kept recording. Day after day. Eventually I had more than a hundred sessions. Hundreds of ideas. Fragments. Melodies. Small moments of fear, grief, tenderness, hope, and light.

I selected ten.

Not necessarily the ten most polished.

The ten that stayed.

The ten that felt the most honest.

The ten that carried the deepest memory of that season.

One day at the cabin stands out.

My kids were with me. People were cleaning up dishes. Food had been made. The family was still trying to function inside a reality none of us had fully accepted yet. We were still trying to show up for the kids — still trying to preserve warmth and structure in the middle of something painful.

I sat down and started playing.

There was a moment in that session when a small musical phrase came through that stopped me. I felt it immediately. It is now part of the B section of track four. I still have the original recording.

It was not technically complicated. It was not something I had labored over.

I allowed it to simply come through me.

And when it did, I felt this wave of encouragement wash over me. Something warm, familiar, and deep. Something I was not manufacturing. Something I was being allowed to experience.

That was the moment I began to understand something about creativity that I had forgotten, or maybe had never fully known.

The best music I could make was not going to come from force.

It was not going to come from proving I was good. It was not going to come from technical control or ambition or some heroic idea of becoming an artist.

It was going to come from surrender.

That word can sound soft until life breaks you open enough to understand how much courage it requires.

For most of my life, I had been trying to become someone. Someone successful. Someone responsible. Someone financially secure. Someone spiritually approved. Someone useful. Someone strong.

But the piano was not asking me to become someone.

It was asking me to listen to the part of me that had always been there.

The part underneath the roles.

The part that had not been ruined by loss.

The part that did not need to prove its worth.

That is the part I have been thinking about a lot lately, especially as a father.

My oldest son is twenty. I think often about how disorienting it must be to come of age right now. He grew up with a very concrete map. Mission. Church. Family structure. Clear expectations. Then his parents left the church. Then his parents divorced. Then friend groups changed. Then the world kept accelerating.

Social media. AI. Economic pressure. Hero worship. The feeling that you are supposed to become something significant before you even know who you are.

I do not envy young people trying to build a life inside that much noise.

I have deep empathy for that pressure, but I also recognize it because I lived my own version of it.

I spent too much of my life trying to prove that I had value. Through work. Through money. Through responsibility. Through achievement. Through being seen as good, stable, impressive, or useful.

That path taught me a lot. I am grateful for parts of it. I chose it sincerely at the time, and I do not want to pretend I did not. It was an education.

But I could also see now that status and approval were never going to be the foundation of a peaceful, authentic life.

They can support a life.

They cannot be the source of one.

What I want my children to know — and what this album taught me — is that there is a quieter but far stronger foundation available. It is not as loud as ambition. It is not as fleetingly impressive as success. It does not always make sense on a resume.

But it is real.

It is the truth of who you are.

Inside every person, there is some younger, softer, more unharmed part. A part that is tender and pure. A part that still knows how to feel wonder. A part that is not trying to dominate the room, win the argument, build the company, earn the money, prove the point, or survive the future.

For a lot of men, that part gets sterilized early.

We learn to be useful. Tough. Independent. Capable. We learn not to burden people. We learn not to need too much. We learn that strength means containment.

And some of that is good. Strength matters. Self-reliance matters. Discipline matters. Action matters. You cannot sit forever in confusion and call it depth. At some point, you have to choose, move, work, and build.

But if strength cuts you off from tenderness, it eventually turns against you.

That is what I had to learn.

The music reconnected me to the tender part of myself without making me feel weak. It made me feel more human. More honest. More alive.

That is why this album matters to me.

Not because I think it proves I am a musician.

Because it helped me stop needing to prove anything.

I am calling this Substack The Musician because I am still getting used to saying that word about myself.

For a long time, I thought being a musician meant being impressive in some recognized way. A performer. A professional. A person with permission.

I do not think that anymore.

A musician is someone who listens for what is true and gives it form.

That is what I am trying to do now.

With music. With writing. With fatherhood. With the rest of my life.

I do not know exactly where this goes. I hope to share the album, the stories behind the songs, the places that shaped them, and what I am still learning about creativity, grief, masculinity, tenderness, and rebuilding a life from the inside out.

But today, I just wanted to begin here:

I thought I had lost almost everything.

Music taught me who I was.

[photography by Meikel Reece]