It Is All Happening

Look at the cover of this album.

My body is pressed against a wall, barefoot, present, human. And my shadow is already gone. Already free. Already something larger and more expansive than the body that cast it. The shadow has no hesitation. The shadow is already in the next chapter.

That image (Tatiana Camacho, photo credit) is the most honest thing I could tell you about where I was when I made this album. The wall was the last thing I would touch before letting go. And the light, that warm, ancient, still light washing over everything, that was the feeling of knowing that what came next would be everything.

Two years ago I recorded an album to mark a moment in my life. A moment of deep clarity, of doors opening, of understanding that music would once again be the vehicle for everything that mattered most to me.

I had just left Habitas, the company my brother Kfir and I spent ten years building into something I am extraordinarily proud of. A global brand that I always called an impact company funded by hospitality. The belief at its core was that anyone who walked through our doors arrived carrying the best version of themselves, and that with the right environment, the right people, the right spirit, that version could be awakened and carried back into their lives. We either validated their reality or changed it. We hired beautiful humans who felt purpose in their work and who loved what they did, and that love was contagious. We opened hotels around the world and we changed people. I know we did.

Leaving that was one of the most significant choices of my life. In the space that followed, I felt something I can only describe as everything opening at once. That feeling became the album.

I want to share it with you again. As an offering. The way you hand something to a friend and say, this meant the world to me.

I ask one thing of you: listen from beginning to end. The way we used to listen to albums. The way I remember The Wall marking me forever. This was composed as a complete journey and every song is a chapter.

It opens with Sunrise with Richard, written to commemorate a sunrise I shared with Richard Bona, one of the most extraordinary artists alive, whose voice carries something ancient and irreplaceable. That morning lives in that song.

All Comes from Africa is a mantra. Everything that comes from Africa feels like home to me. The colors, the sounds, the spirits, the energy. That song is my declaration of that.

The title track It Is All Happening carries that feeling of euphoria and validation when you know you have made the right choice and the world begins to confirm it. My dear friend Hush Forever lent his words and his voice to it and made it something I could never have made alone.

Hombre Sincero is a remake of a traditional Cuban folk song. My father was Cuban, and my older half brother, a mysterious and loving presence in my childhood, used to sing it to me in the car. He would appear in my life with so much joy and then disappear again, and eventually I never saw him again. That song is my way of holding him, of honoring what he gave me, and of sitting with the feeling his absence left behind. I called it Sincere Man.

Interlude for Orchestra and Synth is an ode to two loves that have always lived side by side in me. I studied composition and orchestration, and over the years I fell deeply in love with synthesis, with the science of how an electrical current moves through a machine and becomes music. The duality of that, the tangible and the ethereal, the frequency and the feeling, lives in that piece. It also carries my love for cinematic scoring, for music that holds image and emotion together.

Mirage is exactly that. I love the desert. I feel at home in its vastness. There is something about seeing something on the horizon that may not be there, trusting it, walking toward it, and finding it has moved further away, that I find deeply alive. It is survival. It is seeking. That song holds the anguish and the comfort and the shaking that comes with both.

And the album closes with Reka. A dear friend and extraordinary singer from Hungary who has performed with me many times on stage. She carries a primal feminine energy, soft and warrior at the same time, a lullaby and a strength. Her voice sits above a bed of sound that grounds everything beneath her, and together they bring the album to its close the way a savasana closes a yoga practice. Complete stillness. Full arrival. A place to rest and contemplate everything that just moved through you.

Listen to It Is All Happening on your platform of choice — and as always, thank you for lending me your ears, your hearts and minds.