"The Idea Of You" is the first of a trio of neoclassical solo piano albums composed, performed, and produced by Andrew Souter. These projects have been two decades in the making and represent a return to traditional music composition, engaging song-writing, and the pure passion of emotional story-telling. This Andrew's most personal and intimate music. It is quite literally a love project. We hope it may it help you on your journey, as it has us...

"The Idea Of You" is music inspired by the spirit of Eros and all of its blessings as well as its tribulations. It explores the vicissitudes of romantic love, the delicate seasons and contour of life, and all the lessons learned along the way. Themes of desire, passion, limerence, romantic love, idolatry, jealousy, envy, loss, regret, forgiveness, acknowledgment, appreciation, acceptance, and eventually glimpses of true understanding permeate the work. It attempts to communicate that which so many of us can never quite communicate properly with words. It is an open apology for the clumsy mistakes we all make when coming to maturity in learning how to care selflessly for another human being. It is a gentle reminder as to what is most important in life, as well as an invocation to continuously seek self-improvement regarding our understanding of such matters.

Stylistically "The Idea of You" seats itself firmly between modernist minimalism and lyrical romanticism and credits influences such as Einaudi, Tiersen, Mertens, Nyman, Winston, Sakamoto, Hearts of Space and many others. It intentionally uses a very limited set of production tools in effort to purposefully focus the attention on the human element of the story. Solo piano, 2CAudio reverbs, and a gentle mastering process consisting of light EQ and compression are the only tools used in the vast majority of the project. This is deceptively simple music which intends to have a complex emotional effect on the listener by focussing all of its effort on the intuitive use of harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic theme and variation.

If You Would Only Let Me I would put you first; I would never be too busy. I would tell you daily how important you are to me. I would hold you every night and kiss you every morning. I would explore every inch of your soul and still long to know more. I would hold your hand on long walks. I would break patterns of ineffective communication, admit my own weaknesses, and let go of male pride which deludes me into mistakingly believing I need to know everything about everything. I would listen more actively to any frustrations you may be experiencing and avoid feeling blamed for them. I would avoid offering solutions when all you really need is empathy and friendship, not a super-hero who thinks he has to fix everything. I would learn to work together effectively as a team and value deeply your strengths without feeling threatened by our differences. I would learn to forgo power and choose grace. I would forgive us both for all of the clumsy mistakes we made along the way. I would learn to value what is important. I would give thanks to the universe for the gift of your presence in my life. I would help you become all you are destined to be. I would learn how to love selflessly, and be of service, both to you, as well as to whatever higher power wished to use our example. (VIDEO)

Still Raning There As the saying goes: nothing ever ends well, otherwise it would not end. And yet large parts of us still wish things would not end, even after we convince ourselves it is for the best. Is it an act of grace to accept fate and slowly fade away without a fight, or does the universe want to test our resolve and see just how far we are willing to go to obtain, and more importantly perhaps to keep, the object of our desires? It is human not to know; it is human to exist in bewilderment regarding such matters. Being aware of this, however, never makes it any easier. Endings always bring an emptiness in a person's heart and soul. No one ever wants to fail, but sometimes we wait too long to really try in the right ways to truly succeed. The eleventh hour concession is always the hardest case to handle. It leaves one with many doubts. It leaves a person with the hope that things would be, could be, should be, better if only... In such cases the weather can be forever raining in one's heart. (VIDEO)

The Idea Of You This is your song. I wrote the main parts of it in the first month of our relationship as we were falling in love. I've played parts of it for you before many times, but I had never finished it. I have now evolved it into its complete form. This is how I choose to remember you. I focus on the positives; I idealize and romanticize you. My idea of you remains loving and longing even if we are not meant to be. My idea of you persists and looks past challenges despite how difficult they may seem. I believe our ideas and our ideals create our own reality and therefore it is always best to imagine perfection however we may desire it to be. This song is reflection of all the love and gentleness we shared during good times. Ultimately it is a song of optimism even in the face of adversity. Its verses and chapters moves sideways like the astrological crab that you are, but there is deep beauty in it, and in the end it gets to were it wants to go and finds happiness and peace. Thank you for this song. I hope it may comfort you.

A Dancer Remembered Her pain was overwhelming--to her as well as me. The loss of a dear friend, was too much for her to bare. She felt an empty, helpless despair. She felt powerless. She felt alone.

She came to me, her partner, her lover, and her best friend, for comfort, support, and empathy. I was ill-equipped to provide it and misguided in my approach as was typical of my foolishness at the time. My usual male approach of attempting to fix things and power through difficult situations was completely impotent to solve such things. There is no fixing suicide. There is a finality to death. There is an immutable permanence to it. The path of nature has no power over it. You cannot over power or out think it.

Seeing your loved one in pain and despair is a hard thing. Feeling powerless to make it better for them is even worse. I held her for a short while. I wiped her tears away, half expecting them to disappear as if I had waved a magic wand, but they persisted. They felt cold on her cheek as if giving representation of the emptiness she felt inside. She could light up a small country with a smile over the simplest of pleasures, but her sadness was equally potent and could rip your soul out in an instant. All I wanted to do was to make it better, but I had no idea how to do it. There was no solution.

I was terrified. I felt incompetent. I was too foolish then to realize that she had not come to me for a solution, but rather simply for empathy and acknowledgement of her pain. She wanted to share it with me, just as she always did with her joy. She just wanted me to be there with her. She wanted me to participate in the present moment with her. A tragedy is always better shared, as she later told me when I myself needed comforting -- a painful case of situational irony for me to recall now given my failure to afford her the same luxury. She had always been the wiser one of the two of us, and much faster to choose grace--a skill I had hoped one day she may teach our children.

My own pride left me feeling helpless. I removed myself from the situation. She needed space, I somehow managed to delude myself into believing. So I left her feeling abandoned. I came to the studio and channeled her pain. I did the only thing I was good at, as god knows I was not good at face-to-face emotional support when she needed it. I scored her experience as if it were my own, and remembered for her a person whom I had never met. It came to me effectively in one pass. I did not compose it so much as I simply discovered it, or allowed it to come out of me from somewhere else. She sat upstairs alone crying as I worked. I imagined I felt all of the precarious twists and turns of this poignant emotional roller-coaster that was forced upon her. Indeed I did not have to imagine, for I felt them myself despite being unable to adequately share this with her at the time. I hoped that one day I could fix things by having used her pain to create a thing of pure beauty that could perhaps help her as well as others.

I knew what I was hearing was something special so I quickly recorded the improvisational composition while the moment was still happening. It took only seven or eight minutes to record, despite the composition not existing in any form prior to that night, nor having ever played anything similar to it myself. It took years after that night for my analytical brain to understand what my intuition channeled effortlessly in an instant while under emotional duress -- both my own as well as my loved one's.

It is taking even longer for me to forgo power and simply accept the path of grace over the path of nature. I have since lost the privilege of having her in my life for failing in these lessons. And yet the composition remains. A blessing and a curse... I hope that it may be a blessing for those who hear it. May it implore you, as well as me, to be more introspective, and augment our sense of empathy for our loved ones. May it remind us that there are problems out there that are beyond our capacity to fix, and that sometimes people simply need to be held instead of offered solutions. May the pain contained in this work help others learn these lessons and do better with them than I have. May something beautiful come of it for someone I will never meet...