When I launched the new version of 10Songs.org, the first mixtape I featured was Gospel of the Left Behind—a resurrection mixtape for Easter. I was thinking about resurrection not so much as a theological claim, but as a daily practice. About what it means to live as someone learning to rise again, and again, and again.

Another Beginning is a continuation of that idea. It’s quieter. Less declarative. It breathes the truth rather than singing it.

We open with Ólafur Arnald’s Undone—a voice trembling on the line over twinkling keys. The story of our first becoming. How terrifying and chaotic it must have seemed. And with that the last words have been uttered. From here the mixtape considers how distance changes our perspective on change. The bigger the change the closer it brings us to death. Close up it’s all chaotic and terrifying but take a step back, or six, or seven and what felt infernal and destructive has a quiet sense of purpose. A flaming ball of gas rises in the east and cast’s it’s warmth on our faces.

The result is a more embodied version of the last featured mixtape. Without words the music is soft, contemplative, and stirring. It evokes a place at a particular point in time. A time where something is on the edge of happening. And as I let my body sink into the feelings of these swirling keys and strings I feel my own heart opening. A let in a subtle shift. I remember the more hopeful sensation of being rearranged.

I didn’t plan this mixtape so much as feel my way through it. I let it emerge the way light does: slow, tentative, persistent. By the end, there’s no epiphany. Just motion. Stillness. The sense that something has begun.

I hope you find the thing that’s beginning in you.

With love and music,
Samuel