It always starts with an image.

Maybe it hasn’t always been this way, but it always is now. An image so clear yet dreamlike and unsharable, at least by his hands – never good at drawing, painting, sculpting, or even capturing with cameras, but his brain overflows with visions astonishingly beautiful and horrific.

And so sometimes those images attach themselves to music, something random piping through his earbuds. Heavy, ethereal, cinematic in its own right, whatever. There’s no rhyme or reason to the process, that he can understand. It just happens — music sees imagined vision from across the crowded bar, and after a few shots of liquid courage, music hits on vision and they get married and live together happily ever after.

This, then, is the source. Like an album full of songs that are crafted solely to support a single riff or short chord progression, the stories and characters and dialogue flow entirely as an excuse to describe a lone image that he can not otherwise share with the world.

That’s the sad secret, one which he shares begrudgingly but also suspects is not his alone.