Chris Reynolds - Past is Prologue (2022)

"The pandemic began at an interesting time for me, both musically and personally. I was freshly out of school for the first time in living memory, living in rural upstate New York, far away from the bustle of New York City that I had come to know so well. Like so much of the rest of world, I was lost on exactly what my life was supposed to be. I couldn’t see my future, yet felt the pressure to solidify my present. The music on this album all, in some way or another, originates from this period of self discovery during lockdown. It was emotional healing for me as much as it was intellectual curiosity. I was drawn to the piano as a kid because I wanted to play any and everything that I wanted to and, the piano, with its 88 keys, seemed the perfect vessel for this hunger I had. As time went on, I found myself constantly drawn to all types of music: pop, Kpop, jazz, musical theater with some Beethoven thrown in. But, as the years of conservatory education went on, I found it more and more difficult to branch out into other genres. It wasn’t until I was able to be still and make music for myself, alone in upstate New York, thinking the world was at an end, that I realized the joy in simply being myself. This album is a reflection of everything I am. This isn’t just about bridging the music of the past to the music of the present, although my hope is that people can see that Schumann and Red Velvet are not all that different, but it is also to solidify who I am in this moment. “What’s past is prologue”, Shakespeare writes in the Tempest. By this, he means that the past, like a prologue to a book, informs the events that are yet to come. Lockdown showed me what kind of a musician I want to be, and this album is the prologue, written in stone, setting the precedent for the rest of my life."

- Chris Reynolds