A year ago, Wonderland came into the world.
I still remember the strange quiet after pressing release. After years of carrying those songs privately, they suddenly belonged to the air. To other people. To moments I’d never witness.
At the time it felt huge. Cinematic. Technicolour. Everything turned up.
Now, when I listen back, it feels different. Not smaller, just further away. Like looking at a photograph of yourself from a year you remember clearly, but no longer live inside.
Each song holds a version of me. Questions I was circling. Feelings I didn’t know what to do with. Things I was trying to understand, or let go of, or finally say out loud. When I hear them now, I don’t just hear melodies. I hear the emotional weather of that time. The hopes. The blind spots. The growing pains I didn’t yet know were growing pains.
There’s something tender about that. Hearing your past self trying their best.
Wonderland gave me a place to put things. Feelings that were too big to hold on my own. Thoughts that felt tangled. Grief I couldn’t explain. Joy I didn’t want to dilute. Music has always been that for me... a kind of translation. Turning something invisible into something that can move through air. Something that can sit beside someone else and say, me too. That still feels like magic. Quiet magic. But real.
This album didn’t just document a time in my life. It shaped me. Taught me. Softened me in places I didn’t know were rigid.
I’m grateful to the version of me who made it. Even the parts of him who were confused, or dramatic, or hopeful in ways that hurt later. He was reaching. And that matters.
Thank you for listening, whether you arrived then or later. Thank you for stepping into that world with me, in whatever way you did.
The colours of Wonderland might feel different now. But the feeling it came from… that’s still here.
P.S. I marked the anniversary quietly, with Sketches from Wonderland — the same songs back at the piano where they began. No production, no spectacle. Just the bones. The breath. The beginning again.