Bonus content for disc-bearers!
Welcome, honored disc-bearer…
If you found your way to this page, then you have in your possession (or you snuck a peak at the back cover of) one of 100 copies of our demo — one of the first seeds of Fool And The World.
These songs are still finding their final form. The full album will be born on April 1st, 2026. But you are here at the beginning — one of the first to hear this music as it's unfolding, raw and alive.
This project means the world to us. These songs carry stories that came through dreams, late-night writing sessions, moments of doubt, visions, and breakthroughs. They hold threads of myth, grief, wonder, surrender, and the long walk toward something real.
And by being here, you’re not just listening — you’re helping to bring them into the world. You’re part of the small circle who gave this music its first echo, its first audience, its first breath beyond the studio. Without ears to hear them, these songs would stay whispers. You give them life.
Thank you for walking with us at the very start. For believing before it’s fully formed. For being part of the reason this record will exist.
Below, you’ll find the origin stories behind each of the six songs on this demo — a glimpse into our front-fool’s inner workings, and the world we’re building together.
Enjoy!
1. fool and the world
At first, this song sprouted off of another song as an introduction…
Multiple people have told me,
“That song feels like it’s about EVERYTHING,”
And they were right (though I didn’t realize this until they said it)…
it IS.
Every time I play it, it’s about exactly what I’m going through…
& it’s about exactly what each person who listens to it is going through.
And so when it grew into its own song…
the title that came for it, was the divine couple that encapsulates all the tarot, and in turn, represents the totality of the human experience…
It’s about hope, sorrow, fear, joy, love, longing, and everything else that we humans move through and which moves through us on our individual Fool’s Journey through this life.
For what is any one of us, but a Fool trying to make sense of and make peace with this big, magical, mysterious, nonsensical World we’ve found our self in?
The only thing we can ever truly know, is that, in the grand scheme of things…
we barely know anything at all.
Yet when we
Embrace Unknowing,
Surrender to Mystery,
Open to Discovery,
Bask in Wonderment,
and let our self be led by the Eternal Child within…
We can experience the true Beauty of Being, the Sacred Dance, the Divine Romance between our Self and the World (and every thing/one in it).
For what a miraculous gift it is, to be here at all?
At its heart, Fae is a song about the kind of love that asks us to release control — the kind that doesn’t allow for possession or certainty. Instead, it invites presence. The "fae" in the song isn’t a person so much as an archetype: the reflection of our own creative potential, our capacity to love without grasping, and the courage to meet both ourselves and another with clarity, freedom, and truth.
The process of writing Fae mirrored the themes it carries. After an initial burst of inspiration in late 2021 — a 12-hour, almost manic session where the first version poured out — I thought the song was finished. But as with any honest work, time revealed that something essential was still missing. Another chapter of life had to unfold; another connection had to come and stir what hadn’t yet surfaced. It wasn’t until late 2022, through the unexpected appearance of another muse (and the lessons that followed), that the final words came through and the song finally clicked into place.
There are layers in Fae about gender, about desire, about integrating the many selves we carry inside. About the dance between longing and release. About seeing in the eyes of another not just the beauty of who they are, but the invitation to become more fully who we ourselves are meant to be. The song honors the ways we attract reflections of our highest creative potential — and how those reflections, while beautiful, also challenge us to shed old stories, much like a snake sheds its skin.
Fae belongs to the larger arc of Fool & The World: the search for meaning, connection, and transformation that so many of us carry. The people who find these songs often share the same restless ache: the desire for something real, for relationships that don’t play by conventional rules, for love that honors both intimacy and freedom. Fae is for anyone who's ever fallen into that kind of connection — or who has been brave enough to release it when they had to.
Even now, I hear new meanings in its verses every time I sing it. And like the fae itself — that bright-eyed bird on the wind — the song feels like it’s always arriving, always returning, always asking to be met again.
2. FAE
Fae didn’t arrive all at once. Like the muse it honors, the song revealed itself in layers — elusive, enchanting, and just beyond reach until the time was right.
The earliest seeds of Fae came to me in late 2019, in those liminal months right before the world shifted. The melody arrived first: a kind of longing in musical form — delicate, prayerful, and incomplete, as though waiting for the right reflection to bring its full meaning to life.
At the time, I didn’t know who or what I was writing for, only that something sacred was trying to emerge.
Over the years that followed, Fae became a mirror to my own journey through love, self-discovery, and healing.
The song is woven from multiple threads of connection — relationships with real people who entered my life as living embodiments of the “fae” energy: wild, free, untamable, and deeply illuminating.
Each one became a kind of muse, not because they fulfilled some fantasy, but because they reflected back to me the places within myself that longed for healing, integration, and growth.
3. Wheel of Fate
Wheel of Fate first arrived through a dream.
It was early 2015. I found myself, in the dreamscape, speeding down a winding country road deep in the forest, the dead of night pressing in all around. I wasn’t driving. Pete Bernhard of The Devil Makes Three was behind the wheel, calm and focused.
As we flew through the dark, a melody rose from the car radio—horns carrying an eerie, haunting tune.
I woke up suddenly, heart pounding, with that melody still echoing in my mind. I reached for the nearest instrument—my mandolin—and carefully pulled the melody from the dream into waking life.
Note by note, I translated it into form. As the melody revealed itself, so did the chords that would hold it, weaving together something both ethereal and strangely playful.
The song had a life of its own. Its mystery called for a language beyond logic.
So I turned to the tarot, pulling spreads as though the song itself was asking the cards to speak.
What emerged were verses—a series of reflections, almost like readings themselves. Each verse felt like a mirror offered to the soul, open to whoever might peer into it.
For years, Wheel of Fate lived in this unfinished form. The first two verses carried the song, but the third verse eluded me, as though waiting for the right time to be born. It wasn't until early 2023 that the final verse arrived, completing the circle and allowing the song to finally stand whole.
Wheel of Fate is a song of mirrors. It’s never exactly the same each time I sing it, and it offers something slightly different to every person who hears it. Like the tarot itself, its meaning shifts depending on who is listening, what they’re carrying, and where they are on their own path.
What does it mean to you?
At its core, Spring is simple. It’s a reflection on renewal — on the way life stirs back awake after the cold, on the way color returns to a world that had grown gray. It carries that bittersweet sweetness of longing to be as free and effortless as the changing seasons: to simply let go and move where life carries us, like a drop of melting ice running downstream without hesitation.
The song has always felt like a breath of fresh air — not just for its melody, but for what it reminds us: that no matter how long winter feels, spring always returns. And with it, the hope that whatever blues we carry belong to yesterday.
4. SPRING
Some songs arrive like a slow unfolding. Others come like a sudden bloom. Spring was one of those rare gifts — simple, fast, and complete, like a crocus breaking through the last patch of snow.
It was early 2013, in that quiet edge between winter and spring, when I sat down with my guitar to experiment with a new style of fingerpicking I had just started learning.
As my fingers played, the melody surfaced almost instantly — as though it had been waiting for me to find it. The words followed just as quickly, pouring out in a single session.
There was no struggle, no overthinking — just the song, arriving with the same gentle inevitability that spring itself brings after a long winter.
At the time, I was playing in a project called The Love Sprockets, alongside my former partner Jahnavi, and my lifelong friend Evan Lincoln — who now plays guitar with Fool & The World.
Right from the very beginning, Evan heard the melody and instinctively wove his own counter-melodies into it. His guitar parts added that warm, dual harmony — almost Allman Brothers-esque — that’s become part of the song’s signature feel.
The duet vocal arrangement was also born in those earliest versions, and we’ve been singing it together for over a decade now.
5. Music st.
I wrote the chords and most of the words for this song back in December 2013…
at the time Jahnavi and I were riding our bicycles from Vermont to Texas and had just arrived in New Orleans, where we spent Christmas in an under-renovation shotgun house.
the house we were shivering in was on Music Street in New Orleans...
I was enchanted by the wild-voodoo vibe of the city - and found myself happier than I could remember, despite being essentially homeless, broke, cold, and completely dependent on the kindness of strangers.
so this song sprung forth - everything but the chorus.
and I knew that the chorus was going to be the part that brought all the mish-mash of philosophy and story fragments throughout the verses together into a clear, unifying THOUGHT...
so I shelved the song for the time being.
J & I had plenty of other new ones to work with, and continued to add more to the queue as soon as we landed in Austin.
so this song that I began writing on Music Street just sat in a notebook and in the back of my mind for about 5 years, until we started planning out Chickadee Release Tour in the spring of 2019.
Then, I decided it was time.
so I wrote a melody (which you’ll hear Evan play on electric guitar)... wrote a couple transitional parts... and finished the lyrics.
Took me all of 10 minutes, once I could see the “theme” and put it to words!
The song wrestles with the illusion of separation — between self and other, between beginning and ending, between life and death. It’s a meditation on dissolution: the way love asks us to soften our grip, to feel beyond the edges of identity, to trust the cycle of coming together and falling apart. In the end, everything we cling to — every story, every possession, every identity — dissolves back into the same field of being from which it came.
Oblivion is not about despair, but about release. It’s the space where the separate drops back into the ocean. Where grief becomes grace. Where love refuses to collapse under the weight of loss. Where we remember that what truly is — cannot be taken.
For me, this song remains a kind of personal koan — a distillation of the hardest lessons life gives us, and the strange peace that waits on the other side of surrender.
6. OBLIVION
Some songs arrive like a whisper. Oblivion came like a lightning strike.
It emerged during one of those rare, raw periods where life itself becomes the teacher — where loss, love, and the mystery of existence all converge at once. In the weeks leading up to writing it, I found myself navigating two powerful currents of grief:
preparing to say goodbye to my dog Zoso — my companion, my familiar, my shadow — after 12 years of shared life; and processing the heartbreak of a relationship that had come to end what felt like too soon.
Both felt like pieces of my heart being torn away. Both forced me to sit face-to-face with attachment — and with the truth that nothing we love can stay exactly as it is.
In that space of raw surrender, Oblivion arrived in a single rush, as though it had already been waiting somewhere beyond me.
The words and melody carried the teaching I needed in that moment:
that beyond all the pain of loss, beyond the grasping and the fear of impermanence, there is something deeper — something eternal.