SUMMERLOVE

Michael's blog for his late-girlfriend, love and partner, Summer Serafin. The scattershot beginnings of a memoir...

BIPOLAR EXPLORER / TREMOSPHERE

Michael's bands - acclaimed NYC-based experimental dreampop trio Bipolar Explorer and celebrated NYC shoegaze duo Tremosphere. News, audio, video and links to Bipolar Explorer's eleven albums and six singles and Tremosphere's three albums and four singles on Slugg Records.

Bipolar Explorer's page on Wikipedia.

"COLLECTED PLAYS"

The first anthology of Michael's works for the theatre, Collected Plays, published by The Ginger Press, avail via Amazon.

Deux Anges

Bipolar Explorer

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"Deux Anges" - the band's 9th album - has been named to four Best Albums of the Year lists in 2020 to date, including that of the legendary BBC and Soho Radio broadcaster, Max Reinhardt, who pronounced the album “shimmering”, going on to say, “there is hauntology at work, hauntology right in the center of their work.”

Hailed by sources as diverse

"Deux Anges" - the band's 9th album - has been named to four Best Albums of the Year lists in 2020 to date, including that of the legendary BBC and Soho Radio broadcaster, Max Reinhardt, who pronounced the album “shimmering”, going on to say, “there is hauntology at work, hauntology right in the center of their work.”

Hailed by sources as diverse as The Netherlands Radio Hoogeveen’s post-rock show DeMist and dark ambient program Fog Cast on London’s Resonance-FM in their Best Albums of 2020, by May of 2021 Deux Anges had charted in the Heavily Played Records lists of both the aforementioned KFJC (at #21) and the great WFMU (at #28).

A rather apt distillation of the cross-genre work the band has come to embody, Deux Anges brings together the desperate strands of the ambient, the experimental, field recordings sprinkled with instrumentation - as well as the more traditional dreampop songwriting and shoegaze-y underscored spoken word, that has become their kind of signature.

Again, Max Reinhardt (BBC/Soho Radio) says of the record’s eclecticism: “it’s sort of… well, lots of reference - to The Velvet Underground and somehow or other somewhere between Sonic Youth and ‘The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus’ , but you kind of… you float with it. It makes you float. It’s all so different! And I just have to say, the more you listen to the album, the double-album, the better it gets….”

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eleven:eleven

Bipolar Explorer

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Composed by Michael Serafin-Wells and recorded by the band for the UK's "Dark Outside" experimental radio program. A special broadcast event held over 28+ continuous hours beginning noon GMT April 4, 2020. All works never before heard or released, the special broadcast was this year heard online but without archive or track list. This piece had

Composed by Michael Serafin-Wells and recorded by the band for the UK's "Dark Outside" experimental radio program. A special broadcast event held over 28+ continuous hours beginning noon GMT April 4, 2020. All works never before heard or released, the special broadcast was this year heard online but without archive or track list. This piece had its exclusive broadcast premiere at approximately 22:38GMT.

A limited wider digital release of the track (Bandcamp and Slugg Records only) began April 10 2020.

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Til Morning Is Nigh

Bipolar Explorer

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NYC dreampop trio follow up their celebrated 7th album, SOMETIMES IN DREAMS -“unforgettable and essential” (Indiemusic - France) - with this 23-track soundscape of shoegaze, dreampop and spoken word underscored by post-rock guitar.

“Unforgettable and essential. Magical and majestic.” - Indiemusic (France) “Great, beautiful drifty-pop, full of

NYC dreampop trio follow up their celebrated 7th album, SOMETIMES IN DREAMS -“unforgettable and essential” (Indiemusic - France) - with this 23-track soundscape of shoegaze, dreampop and spoken word underscored by post-rock guitar.

“Unforgettable and essential. Magical and majestic.” - Indiemusic (France) “Great, beautiful drifty-pop, full of sadness and wonder.” - WFMU “Epic and affecting.” - Surface Noise “Significant, stirring and addictive” - Ground Control Magazine

ABOUT THIS ALBUM: NYC dreampop trio follow up their celebrated 7th album, SOMETIMES IN DREAMS -“unforgettable and essential” (Indiemusic - France) - with this 23-track soundscape of shoegaze, dreampop and spoken word underscored by post-rock guitar.

Featuring both new compositions and new instrumentation (organ, synth, melodica). And new voices - joining band co-founders Summer and Michael is Sylvia Solanas. Originally from the south of France, Ms Solanas voices spoken word in French on the new album and is a co-founder (with Michael) of the band's brand new sibling in dreampop, Tremosphere, who themselves will release a debut album early in 2019.

“So… we had already had plans to write and record this album, our eighth, early this year and had the good fortune to be gifted the rights (by The Slovak National Gallery) to the breathtaking painting by the late L’udovit Kochol that graces its cover. But before we could begin in earnest, Michael was hit by a car on the day before his birthday in April, awaking in the ER with serious injuries. Then, two weeks later as he was initially released, collapsed on the sidewalk outside of the hospital, in Sylvia’s arms. Terrified, she screamed for help and texted Summer’s dad, a MD, who replied immediately in all caps: “pulmonary embolism”. Rushed back into Trauma, his heart stopped for a full ten minutes. Usually fatal, it's something of a miracle he is still with us - returned and guarded by angels on both sides of the divide. This record, a dream bridging that very chasm, echoes those moments between worlds, like a late night broadcast from a distant radio transmitter drifting to us as we lay half asleep in the midwinter twilight. The album’s bilingual spoken word mirrors this, too - angels (Michael’s and our own), both celestial and earthly, enveloping us with love and protection”

Happy Christmas.

Summer, Michael & Sylvia.

Summer Serafin - vocals, spoken word. Michael Serafin-Wells - vocals, guitars, bass, synth, organ, melodica, tape loops, percussion, spoken word. Sylvia Solanas - spoken word (French).

Recorded live, nosily and in a hurry at The Shrine - NYC. All songs by Michael Serafin-Wells and/or traditional arranged by Serafin-Wells. c. 2018 Thirteen November Music (ASCAP), Produced by Bipolar Explorer.

Mastered by Scott Craggs, Old Colony - Boston. Artwork/layout by Audun Grimstad. Cover image: “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel”, L’udovit Kochol, 1972, Slovak National Gallery, source: Webumenia.sk. Used with kind permission.

c/p 2018 Bipolar Explorer, Slugg Records and Thirteen November Music (ASCAP)

For Summer, with love forever. A thousand divine angels watch, bless and keep you.

ABOUT THE BAND: Their seventh album, SOMETIMES IN DREAMS (2018) hailed as "epic and affecting" by Surface Noise, their sixth album, DREAM TOGETHER (2017), praised by France’s Indiemusic as “magical and majestic - an ultimate tour-de-force”, their double-album, OF LOVE AND LOSS (2013) - "The most significantly stirring and addictive musical accomplishment we've come across in some time. Taut, emotional, urgent and altogether haunting” - and its follow-up, ANGELS (2015) - “Electrifying, what music fueled by raw love and emotions sounds like” - each a Critics Pick for Best Albums of the Year by Ground Control Magazine, Bipolar Explorer are an NYC-based dreampop, post-rock group founded by Summer Serafin (vocals) and Michael Serafin-Wells (lead guitar & vocals, bass, organ, synth, melodica and percussion), notable for intimate, electric live performances, unimpeachable songwriting, uncompromising DIY ethos and their playing without drums.

Featured on the legendary Irene Trudel's show on WFMU ("America's best radio station" - Rolling Stone) who calls their sound "beautiful, great drifty pop, filled with sadness and wonder”, the band follow up their celebrated seventh album, SOMETIMES IN DREAMS - "Unforgettable and essential. This is a major record" (Indiemusic -France), reaching the #19 chart position of WFMU’s album charts in May 2018 and entering the top 200 of the North America College and Community Radio (NACC) listings - with this 23-track dreamscape of shoegaze, dreampop and spoken word underscored by post-rock guitar.

Recorded, mixed and produced by the band at The Shrine in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, TIL MORNING IS NIGH is the band's the eighth album overall and their fourth in just the span of twenty-eight months.

In June 2016, the group released ELECTRIC HYMNAL, a sixteen track collection of devotional songs and spoken word (both secular and sacred) - a meditation and sonic prayer for their fallen bandmate, Michael's true love and partner, Summer Serafin - in a limited edition one-time pressing on CD only (no digital), offering it free of charge, as a gift of faith.

Again, praised by Ground Control: "...Get ready to be swept up and away by a prayerful reverie of melodies. Listening, I began to feel like I was flying. Don’t forget that Bipolar Explorer is a post-rock band. Low growling vocals, gnarly grinding tempos, rhythmic looping strands that escape and rise above the weight of this world, where angels and the living mingle…"

The interweaving of spoken word into the band’s work was explained by Serafin-Wells recently in conversation with USC filmmaker, Alexandra Dennis-Renner, who is making a documentary, "Sonic Prayer", about the band. Having begun work on the live performance arts installation piece that ultimately became the double-album, SOMETIMES IN DREAMS, Serafin-Wells says,“the idea of a female voice, a spoken word narrator - like in a novel or off-camera in a film - came to mind. To tell the story in tandem with the band, supported by film projections in collaboration with a visual artist. And once I wrote the narrative voice for the that, it just started to seem a natural thing, making its way into “Electric Hymnal” and “Dream Together”. Ya know? In that way that things sort of cross-pollinate through multiple projects. We were listening a lot to Laurie Anderson’s “Heart of A Dog” at the time and we kinda thought… yeah.”

In artistic collaboration with several visual artist friends of the band, TIL MORNING IS NIGH, SOMETIMES IN DREAMS, DREAM TOGETHER and ELECTRIC HYMNAL were originally conceived for performance as live installation pieces, in intimate, non-traditional settings. Immersive and multi-media, this direction might well be seen as a natural outgrowth of the band’s perennial choice of performance setting - art galleries - and other non-traditional venues. However, live shows aside the albums have very much become performances themselves.

“We’re enormously romantic about radio”, Serafin-Wells continues. “I can’t tell you how much we’ve been immersed in the work of ambient masters like Stars of the Lid as I’ve written and we’ve recorded these last four albums. I really see that as our template going forward, the album itself, an uninterrupted flow of sound taking you somewhere and really both audio document and the performance of its composition all in one.”

Ms. Solanas’s appearance on the new album helps cement that, Serafin-Wells adds. “Sylvia is amazing, invaluable and, personally, the dearest person in my life. We began this work on the other project - Tremosphere, sort of Bipolar Explorer’s sister band - and it was a natural fit for her to do spoken word with the group. She has an incredible empathy and feel for it. I sort of feel that Summer and she and I all three melt into one in the sonic sense on this record. Maybe in every sense.”

Forging an unique sound - described variously as shoegaze, dreampop, slowcore, post-rock and minimalist indie - well serves the new songs Serafin-Wells began writing in the aftermath of the tragic loss of the group's female vocalist, Michael's love and partner, Summer Serafin, who passed away after a tragic accident in 2011. She was just 31. At work at the time on a new record, the group eventually returned to those recordings, adding them to a handful of newly written songs post-tragedy and re-conceiving the album as both a testament and tribute to Ms. Serafin – muse, collaborator and True Love - yielding a double-album, OF LOVE AND LOSS, released to great acclaim in October 2012.

As Michael told Indiemusic’s Raphael Duprez in a feature about the band (February 2017): “All of this is entirely for her. I often say that our music, each album, is of, for and about her. It’s my way of telling people about her and talking to her myself. That’s the “for’ and “about” parts of the equation. And Summer remains an integral part of the band - not only as its inspiration but, because I have lots of her isolated vocals from other recording sessions - as her voice, both spoken and singing, graces each record. I’ll write songs and fly in her voice. Summer isn’t the main reason BPX goes on, she’s the only reason. She is the reason. And I think I can trust that I’m doing things for the right reason if I always know the reason for it is her. Not out of any ambition other than to honor and conjure her. She’s my conscience."

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The Dark Outside, The Light Within

Bipolar Explorer

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Composed by Michael Serafin-Wells and recorded by the band for London's "The Dark Outside" experimental radio program. A special event held over 24 hours on the summer solstice, this piece had its exclusive broadcast premiere June 20th, 2019, live on London 87.7 FM, from The Hunting Lodge of Waltham Forest in collaboration with the London Borough

Composed by Michael Serafin-Wells and recorded by the band for London's "The Dark Outside" experimental radio program. A special event held over 24 hours on the summer solstice, this piece had its exclusive broadcast premiere June 20th, 2019, live on London 87.7 FM, from The Hunting Lodge of Waltham Forest in collaboration with the London Borough of Culture.

A limited wider digital release of the track (Bandcamp and Slugg Records only) began July 19, 2019.

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Interiors

Tremosphere

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INTERIORS is the debut album of Tremosphere, with Bipolar Explorer co-founder Michael Serafin-Wells (guitars, bass, organ, synth, tape loops, backing vocals, spoken word, percussion) and introducing Sylvia Solanas (lead vocals, spoken word).

Featuring Serafin-Wells’s signature post-rock, shoegaze-y guitars and Ms. Solanas’s breathy alto vocals,

INTERIORS is the debut album of Tremosphere, with Bipolar Explorer co-founder Michael Serafin-Wells (guitars, bass, organ, synth, tape loops, backing vocals, spoken word, percussion) and introducing Sylvia Solanas (lead vocals, spoken word).

Featuring Serafin-Wells’s signature post-rock, shoegaze-y guitars and Ms. Solanas’s breathy alto vocals, their sound is a kind of NYC dreampop seasoned with a dash of French wanderlust.

Following on the heels of their debut single, “Lost & Found” and released simultaneously with their post-rock cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control”, INTERIORS consists of seven new compositions - lyrics by Solanas, music & additional lyrics by Serafin-Wells - and was recorded at The Shrine in NYC concurrently with Bipolar Explorer’s 8th album, Til Morning Is Nigh (“Dreamlike, luminous and enchanting” - Les Oreilles Curieuses), which also features Ms. Solanas on spoken word.

INTERIORS and the band’s two singles are available on Slugg Records.

c/p 2019 Tremosphere, Thirteen November Music (ASCAP), Slugg Records. All rights reserved. www.sluggrecords.com

Sylvia Solanas: lead vocals, spoken word. Michael Serafin-Wells: guitars, bass, organ, synth, tape loops, backing vocals, spoken word, percussion.

Recorded live, noisily and in a hurry at The Shrine- NYC.

Lyrics- Sylvia Solanas. Music & additional lyrics- Michael Serafin-Wells.

Produced by Tremosphere.

Mastered by Scott Craggs, Old Colony- Boston. Artwork/layout by Audun Grimstad. Cover photo by Sylvia Solanas.

"...The sixth and most diaphanous layer of the earth's atmosphere, the Tremosphere is home to sound waves of eerie and unusual frequency, curious and wonderful radio transmissions long feared lost and the mysterious spectral presence of the spirits that seemingly alight there amidst its vaporous, ethereal mists..."

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Sometimes in Dreams

Bipolar Explorer

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"Unforgettable and essential. This is a major record" - Indiemusic (France)

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Dream Together

Bipolar Explorer

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NYC dreampop trio, Bipolar Explorer, follow up their critically-acclaimed albums "Of Love And Loss" and "Angels" (Best Albums of the Year, 2013 & 2015 - Ground Control Magazine) with this breathtaking new work. "Eclectic, steadfast, powerful" - PopMatters

ABOUT THIS ALBUM: Their sixth album, NYC dreampop trio Bipolar Explorer follow up their

NYC dreampop trio, Bipolar Explorer, follow up their critically-acclaimed albums "Of Love And Loss" and "Angels" (Best Albums of the Year, 2013 & 2015 - Ground Control Magazine) with this breathtaking new work. "Eclectic, steadfast, powerful" - PopMatters

ABOUT THIS ALBUM: Their sixth album, NYC dreampop trio Bipolar Explorer follow up their critically acclaimed albums “Of Love and Loss” and “Angels” (Best Albums of the Year - Ground Control Magazine, 2013 and 2015, respectively) with this breathtaking new work.

Released on New Year’s Day 2017, DREAM TOGETHER found immediate praise from WFMU’s Liz Berg as “just a great album for winter” and USC filmmaker and author Alexandra Dennis-Renner writing on the day of its release “in light of a new year, I encourage everybody to snap up a copy of Bipolar Explorer's new album, "Dream Together", that dropped with the ball today. Every song on "Dream Together" is a reminder that the end of one thing is not necessarily the beginning of something new--not a hard reset--but the continuation of what was through the lens of what could be. What will be. And proof that there is always love, hope, and strength in that journey. There's something here for you and you are loved.”

Charting on both WFMU and at #18 on KDVS in the first weeks after its release, DREAM TOGETHER was received glowingly in France in a review by Raphael Duprez for Indiemusic Magazine:

"New York’s Bipolar Explorer offers a new album, their sixth, Dream Together (Slugg Records) which is as much a reverie as a dream burning and crawling gently under our bare skins. In perpetual search for the discovery of the unknown, the trio delivers a work as simple as it is majestic and pure. The guitars charged with reverb and delay, voices and choruses distant but warm, all in an atmosphere as moist as light, like a refreshing breeze before the storm. Daring and emotionally naked, doubtless this record may undo some. But we must yield to the temptation, the inexorable attraction of these magical and nostalgic, deep and milky songs. Alternatingly dark ("Thirteen", “View”), angelic and aerial (“Dream 3”), painful and urgent (“She Hears You Calling”), catching and cathartic, the album closes with the ten-minute epic "To The Other Half Of The Sky” - loaded with palpable electricity as well as an ultimate tour de force in softness - the group relaxing its muscles and leaving notes hovering long after its ultimate resonances. Devilishly endearing, Dream Together offers that rare possibility for us to traverse vast lands, leaving so primordial a place for our imagination, all by means of sonics that are literally enveloping and vibrating. A LP that is drunk, slowly, to better quench thirst. A walk through the clouds, without worrying about the next day."

DREAM TOGETHER is available both as a digital download and as a limited-edition CD with a beautiful 20-page booklet including song lyrics, narrative poems and vintage photos in the style of a Victorian book of verses, written and conceived by frontman Michael Serafin-Wells and art directed by the New York School of Visual Arts’s Audun Grimstad.

ABOUT THE BAND: Their double-album, OF LOVE AND LOSS (2013) - "The most significantly stirring and addictive musical accomplishment we've come across in some time. Taut, emotional, urgent and altogether haunting” - and its follow-up, ANGELS (2015) - “Electrifying, what music fueled by raw love and emotions sounds like” - each a Critics Pick for Best Albums of the Year by Ground Control Magazine, Bipolar Explorer are an NYC-based dreampop, post-rock trio - featuring Summer Serafin (vocals), former Uncle frontman Michael Serafin-Wells (lead guitar & vocals, bass and percussion), Jason Sutherland (guitar & backing vocals) and occasional guests - notable for intimate, electric live performances, unimpeachable songwriting, uncompromising DIY ethos and their playing without drums.

Featured on the legendary Irene Trudel's show on WFMU ("America's best radio station" - Rolling Stone) who calls their sound "beautiful, great drifty pop", the band’s newest record, DREAM TOGETHER, is released on Slugg Records New Years Day 2017.

Recorded, mixed and produced by the band at The Shrine in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, DREAM TOGETHER is the group’s sixth album overall and their second in just the span of a year.

In June 2016, the group released ELECTRIC HYMNAL, a sixteen track collection of devotional songs and spoken word (both secular and sacred) - a meditation and sonic prayer for their fallen bandmate, Michael's true love and partner, Summer Serafin - in a limited edition one-time pressing on CD only (no digital), offering it free of charge, as a gift of faith.

Again, praised by Ground Control: "...Get ready to be swept up and away by a prayerful reverie of melodies. Listening, I began to feel like I was flying. Don’t forget that Bipolar Explorer is a post-rock band. Low growling vocals, gnarly grinding tempos, rhythmic looping strands that escape and rise above the weight of this world, where angels and the living mingle…"

The interweaving of spoken word into the band’s work was explained by Serafin-Wells recently in conversation with USC filmmaker, Alexandra Dennis-Renner, who is making a documentary, "Sonic Prayer", about the band.

Having begun work on a live performance art adaptation of their double-album, OF LOVE AND LOSS - first presented as a "concert performance" in Brooklyn in October 2015 and expected to premiere in a found, possibly sacred venue sometime early-2017 - Serafin-Wells says,“the idea of a female voice, a spoken word narrator, came to mind. To tell the story in tandem with the band, supported by film projections. And once I wrote the narrative voice for the live Of Love, that just started to seem a natural thing, making its way into ELECTRIC HYMNAL and DREAM TOGETHER. Ya know? In that way that things sort of cross-pollinate through multiple projects. We were listening a lot to Laurie Anderson’s “Heart of A Dog” at the time and we kinda thought… yeah.”

In artistic collaboration with Yale’s Evan Yionoulis and several visual artist friends of the band, both OF LOVE AND LOSS and DREAM TOGETHER are conceived for performance as live installation pieces, in intimate, non-traditional settings.

Immersive and multi-media, this direction might well be seen as a natural outgrowth of the band’s perennial choice of performance setting - art galleries - and other non-traditional venues.

In conversation with Ground Control, Serafin-Wells once explained their live approach, saying, "we're not quite ex-punkrockers who decided to play without a drummer and not so damn loud, partly out of necessity and partly to see if we liked it."

Forging an unique sound - described variously as shoegaze, dreampop, slowcore, post-rock and minimalist indie - well serves the new songs Serafin-Wells began writing in the aftermath of the tragic loss of the group's female vocalist, Michael's love and partner, Summer Serafin, who passed away after a tragic accident in 2011. She was just 31.

At work at the time on a new record, the group eventually returned to those recordings, adding them to a handful of newly written songs post-tragedy and re-conceiving the album as both a testament and tribute to Ms. Serafin – muse, collaborator and True Love. The eclectic mix of studio and home recordings – entirely appropriate given Summer’s own fierce commitment to retaining the immediacy of the band’s demos in all “proper” releases - yielded a double-record, OF LOVE AND LOSS released to great acclaim in October 2012.

As Michael told Ground Control's Daryl Darko Barnett in a feature about the band "…It's kinda of, for and about her. Every last step of this - the final mixes, the final mastering, the final art (the double CD comes with a collage poster of photos and an incredibly arresting cover, Alex Alemany’s painting “Mediterraneo”) – it was really hard to let go of because it felt like something was ending. But playing these songs out – and we’re not trying to replicate Summer’s vocals, no one could – it’s still something going forward. It’s like a kind of prayer to her and we know, we can feel it – she’s around.”

Bipolar Explorer's releases include "Dream Together" (2017), "Electric Hymnal" (2016), "Angels" (2015), their holiday album - "BPXmas" (2014), "Of Love and Loss" (2012), the digital-only singles "We'll All Go Together" (2016) and "Downtown Train" (2015) and their earlier (pre-Summer) debut "Go Negative". All titles are available on Slugg Records.

released January 1, 2017

Summer Serafin: vocals. Michael Serafin-Wells: guitars, bass, percussion, vocals. Jason Sutherland - guitar, backing vocals.

Additional spoken word - Kim Donovan.

Recorded live, noisily and in a hurry at The Shrine - New York City. Produced by Bipolar Explorer.

Mastered by Scott Craggs, Old Colony - Boston. Cover image: “Drowse” by Natalia Drepina. Booklet conceived by Michael Serafin-Wells. Art direction/layout: Audun Grimstad.

All songs by Michael Serafin-Wells, c. 2017 Thirteen November Music (ASCAP), c/p Slugg Records.

For Summer who filled my life with light and love and who is with me, I know. Not least of all for coming to me in dreams with several of these songs. In that magic place, between sleep and wake, I would quickly reach bedside to sing them into my phone before rising and figuring out the rest on guitar in the light of dawn. Little sweetheart, thank you. I know with all my soul that we are indeed “just a heartbeat apart”. With all my love forever...

-Michael Serafin-Wells, New York City, Jan 1, 2017

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    0:00/5:38
  3. 3
    0:00/6:16
  4. 4
    0:00/6:23
  5. 5
    View 4:18
    0:00/4:18
  6. 6
    0:00/5:24
  7. 7
    0:00/4:47
  8. 8
    0:00/6:04
  9. 9
    0:00/2:56
  10. 10
    0:00/5:05
  11. 11
    0:00/5:18
  12. 12
    0:00/10:37