Arrive is an album that was four years in the making. It spans multiple genres with some songs containing full orchestral scores. One of the overarching themes of the album deals with how we connect (or fail to connect) to each other in our current technology-driven world. The songs serve as a reminder that the world around us is not how it seems on our smartphone screens, and that we can easily spend so much time connecting online that our virtual life replaces our real one. The songs are a reflection of our modern world and all of its overly-connected yet somehow disconnected feelings. The title track "Arrive" is a call to arms, an invitation to travel the world and see it for yourself. You can't know the world as it really looks through a screen. All around the world, people are waiting there for you to arrive. Other songs on the album include the ragtime influenced "Walking Along in the Rain" where the smartphone users are so enraptured looking down that they walk right into poles. Another song "I'm Not Really There" features a narrator who spends so much time posting about where they are that they never really experience the place. These two songs juxtapose modern tech-driven themes with ragtime, one of the oldest American music styles. Other songs such as "The Only One I Know" deal with a character whose only connection to the outside world is a barista with which he falsely believes he's in a relationship. Recording sessions for the album began in mid-2012 under the working title "Modern Problems". My daughter had just been born prior to recording, so I had to lay down the tracks sporadically in the evenings while she slept. After taking all of 2013 off from recording, the sessions resumed in 2014, with all the instruments being recorded in intricate layers. I had used orchestral scores previously in other film and video projects, but this was the first time I had applied a full orchestra to my own music giving them a rich, full sound. Intensive mixing and mastering sessions were finally completed in early 2016.