That was me and songwriter Kelly Slusher. She since changed her name to Avaleya Kelly. We were in love so we produced a love album together. The EP entitled A Sunrise is now available here to stream via Bandcamp, but it turns out that it has been available on Spotify and Apple Music for, I don’t know, a long time.
Originally, we published with CD Baby and sold CD’s. That was how you heard this album: You bought a CD. We sold maybe 50 of them. CD Baby helps with digital distribution, and they put it on Spotify, years after the fact.
Within a few months of becoming steady partners, fall of 2008, Kelly and I produced this EP and set up a west coast tour. Kelly came up with the name, Imra. It sounds like an esoteric deity and we liked it for some reason. It was very common to post a few songs on MySpace, contact local venue bookers directly on the social network, print a CD-R album in conjunction with CD Baby, and hit the road just like that. That’s what we did.
“Sweet Love” opens the album, and I think it’s the best track on it. It was Kelly’s song, but I totally transformed it from her acoustic guitar version. Although I maintained her chord changes, everything is built on the Arp Odyssey and her electric bass. When we finished this song, it seemed more like a band than a Kelly Slusher song.
“On and On” is a beautiful tune, I think, and it was also a Kelly song. We kept the guitar version, recording it in a room with natural reverb, adding the synthesizer later, it is my second favorite cut on the record. Then we wrote three songs strictly together, and those are the three in the middle of the album.
This album contains valuable ideas and vibrations meant for opening space for a relationship. On the other hand, it can be of benefit to one’s relationship to the whole world, not just romance. The truth is that in the two years Kelly and I were together, we slipped into the dark side and never recovered. We fell prey to our own fears and all that junk that challenges those initial impulses of mutual love and respect.
Our love and determination carried us a long way. As with anything on this blog, I’m not running away from the things that went wrong. I won’t tell you all the stories, but I’ll admit that I’ve brought problems into relationships that a more mature, more secure version of myself today would not bring.
Not all relationships are meant to last either. The pain can just be in the attachments that we feel for it and our egoistic clashes to hang on or make the other person wrong to justify leaving the relationship.
This blog post is just to get the album up in here. We put a lot of work into Imra. When I have more content from us put together, then I’ll write a memoire piece and compile a portfolio page for Imra. For now, I just want to make sure this album is available to stream. I still think its a pretty good EP.
