Embrace the lo-fi aesthetic of this, as it was originally recorded in 2007.

I wrote Dropping My Plans as a response to the news of a small-town tragedy that acutely affected a friend of mine. It was a scary time, and the way that I approached the situation was to write was I feeling, a sort of empathic distillation of how it must feel to experience an unresolved loss, leading an entire community into a state of crippling paranoia.

I didn't know the outcome of it until after I recorded it, when news broke that the body of the abducted child had been found in a lake. All that they ever had was taken away, and along with it, all that they ever could have had.

It feels appropriate to release this in 2020, a year that has taken so much from so many, a time in history like others before it when the struggle to create a world of relative sanity and safety amid the most dire of circumstances is the bravest thing one can do.

Plans have been canceled. Livelihoods have been forever altered. Loved ones have been lost. Dreams of a brighter future seems dim in the face of a dystopian present, and darker still when held to the light of the recent past once taken for granted by so many, including myself.

The Dalai Lama once said, "There is a saying in Tibetan, 'Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.' No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster.”

After the murder of Kelsey Smith, which many feel could have been prevented if Verizon Wireless had located her by pinging her cell phone, the community banded together and led the cause toward the creation of the Kelsey Smith Act, a law that states that cell-phone companies can ping a phone if authorities determine that a subscriber is in danger.

So please, don't give up hope. It's the hopeful and the resilient, in spite of how bad things might appear, that will create a better world than the one before.

Here's to a Happier New Year in 2021.

- spaceship