Aston River / Private archive
You have already heard pieces of it.
The Red Book is my private archive. It holds what I lived through, what I couldn’t explain, and what I chose to turn into music. I have left pieces of it in songs, artwork and codes.
Finding them is only the beginning. Understanding how they fit together is the harder part.
The song
Some things are easier to write into a song than to tell someone across a table. You can be honest about a feeling and still keep the person who caused it to yourself. You can describe what happened and leave out the detail that would make it too easy to recognize. That is how parts of this book work.
The Red Book keeps the connection between what happened and what became music. A real moment can become a scene. Someone I knew can become a character. Something I could never bring myself to say can survive inside a line that seems to be about someone else.
Some of what I wrote was meant for one person. Some of it was how I kept things to myself. You can hear both in the songs. You don’t have to know who that person was to understand what it felt like.
It began with an experience at a window when I was a child. That part is already in the music. The book takes you into what connects it to everything else.
I share the experience. I keep some of the details. That space between the two is where the codes belong.
A song may give you the consequence. Another may bring you closer to what came first. A detail can move from a lyric into an image. A phrase can return in a different situation. The connection may only become clear when you come back to something you thought you had already understood.
Take a phrase you can’t get out of your head. Read it again after a different song. Study the artwork without the music playing. Look for a mark you have seen somewhere else. Ask why that detail stayed when everything around it changed.
RVR. X. ∞. The cover belongs to this language too. You will find some meanings by paying attention to the songs. Others take a little more patience.
The book is scattered. The connections are there to find.
The first route is open below. Everything you need for it is already in the lyrics.
The first route
Open a song. Read closely. Return with what the clue is asking for.
/ 3 pages opened
The narrator has the book. The chorus gives one instruction. Bring it back.
Open song & lyricsWKH ERRN LV QRW NHSW LQ RQH SODFH.
That key doesn’t fit this page. Try the chorus.Page opened.
Find the shortest command in the chorus.
Only one thing receives the poet’s grief. Find it. Bring it back.
Open song & lyricsZKDW UHWXUQV LV ZRUWK IROORZLQJ.
That key doesn’t fit this page. Try the closing passage.Page opened.
Find the line that begins “I grieve only”.
In the middle of everything I’m trying to contain, I hold something so tight. What is it?
Open song & lyricsNHHS WKH FRQQHFWLRQ. FRPH EDFN WR WKH ERRN.
That key doesn’t fit this page. Read the lines before the second hook.Page opened.
Look for the phrase “hold the”.
A page from the book
I used to think I was searching for someone. Years later, I realized how much of that search had become music. The book holds both: what I lived, and what I made from it.
Keep the things that return. You may need them again.
The book will grow. A later song may change a connection you thought you understood. A page that seems complete may send you back to something you passed over.
You can listen without following any of it. But if a detail keeps bothering you, stay with it. That is usually where I would begin.
