One of the most natural things the mind does is turn experience into identity.

Something happens, and before long it is no longer simply something that happened. It becomes something about who we are.

This is not necessarily a mistake. It may even be inevitable to some degree. Especially when we are young, identity provides continuity. Experiences come and go, while identity offers a stable answer to the question, “Who am I?”

Perhaps that is why certain experiences become so defining. They are not only remembered; they are incorporated.

The difficulty appears later, when life changes.

Sometimes reality changes faster than identity can. A relationship ends. A career disappears. Children no longer live with you every day. A home is lost. None of these events automatically produce a new identity. They simply remove the reality that had quietly supported the previous one.

This is sometimes described as an identity collapse.

I am no longer sure that this is the right description.

Collapse suggests something that suddenly falls apart. What I experienced felt more like a reality that no longer had room for the identity that had previously made sense. The identity did not disappear overnight. It slowly became impossible to inhabit in the same way.

There is a temptation, at that point, to construct another identity as quickly as possible. The mind understandably wants somewhere to stand.

But another possibility occasionally appears.

Not the absence of identity, and not the achievement of some transcendent state beyond identity, but a gradual loosening of the need to translate every important experience into a definition of oneself.

The experience can remain an experience.

This is much easier to understand than to live.

There are moments when this observation feels almost self-evident. It brings a surprising sense of stability and lightness. At other times, exactly the same observation can feel threatening or even destabilizing. The words have not changed. What has changed is the place from which they are being received.

This makes me wonder whether understanding itself has conditions.

Perhaps insights do not transform us merely because they are true. Perhaps they become available only when the person hearing them has already undergone enough of the transformation that the words can finally find somewhere to land.

If that is the case, then psychological change is not only a matter of acquiring better ideas.

It is also a matter of time.

Not passive time, but the slow work through which reality, experience, and attention gradually reshape the person capable of receiving those ideas.

Looking back, many of the changes that now seem obvious did not feel like achievements. They felt more like processes that happened while I continued living.

Perhaps identity changes in the same way.

Not through deciding who we will become, but through allowing reality to keep revealing which identities no longer need to carry quite so much of who we are.

I have often wondered whether there is a difference between surviving an upheaval and becoming organized around it.

Many years ago I read Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. I remember feeling a certain distance between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, though I would not trust myself enough as a reader to defend the comparison too strongly. Perhaps I am describing only my own reading of them.

Shalamov seemed less interested in what the camps meant than in what they were.

Cold.

Hunger.

Fatigue.

Work.

Luck.

The gradual narrowing of human possibilities under certain conditions.

There was something observational in it. Less interested in extracting a philosophy than in remaining faithful to the texture of reality.

What stayed with me was the feeling that this way of looking at things leaves a person strangely mobile.

If conditions change, one changes with them.

If the camp ends, the camp ends.

This sounds obvious until one notices how often human beings continue living inside conditions that no longer exist.

The soldier remains organized around the war.

The revolutionary around the revolution.

The patient around the illness.

The divorced person around the divorce.

The identities that allow us to survive a period have a tendency to survive the period itself.

Perhaps they have to.

Identity is not a costume that can simply be removed when circumstances improve. It is often the thing that carried us through those circumstances in the first place.

There may even be a loyalty involved.

A suspicion that moving on diminishes what happened.

That abandoning the identity means betraying the experience that produced it.

Perhaps this is why some people leave the camp and some part of them remains there.

Not because they choose it.

Not because they fail.

Simply because human beings adapt deeply to their environments, and adaptation does not always know when history has moved on.

The difficulty is not in surviving the upheaval.

The difficulty is recognizing when the conditions that shaped you no longer require the same person they once did.

Imagine a young fox, not yet fully grown.

One day, an eagle notices it.

For a few minutes, perhaps less, the eagle dives repeatedly. The fox runs, hides, escapes, runs again. One of the attacks damages its eye. Then eventually the eagle gives up, or the fox reaches safety.

The event is over.

Before those few minutes, the fox had never experienced anything like it. Afterward, life continues. The fox hunts, sleeps, explores, grows older. The attack occupies only a tiny fraction of its life.

Yet something remains.

The obvious answer is that the fox learns. It may become more attentive to shadows overhead. It may move differently in open terrain. Its nervous system incorporates new information about the world.

That seems natural enough.

But humans often do something more.

When something overwhelming happens, we do not only ask what happened. We ask what it means.

What does it mean about me?

What does it mean about other people?

What does it mean about the world?

An event that lasts minutes can become a question that lasts years.

In this sense, trauma is not merely an event. Nor is it simply a painful memory. Trauma often appears when an event cannot be fully integrated into the structure through which we understand ourselves and reality.

The event ends, but its implications remain unresolved.

A person who is betrayed may no longer be dealing only with betrayal. They may be dealing with the question of trust itself.

A person who is abandoned may no longer be dealing only with abandonment. They may be dealing with the question of whether they are lovable.

A person who is humiliated may no longer be dealing only with humiliation. They may be dealing with the question of their worth.

The original event becomes attached to identity.

Perhaps this is why healing is often so difficult. The goal is not to erase what happened. The fox really did lose part of its eye. The injury is real. The event matters.

The challenge is to allow the event to become part of one’s story without allowing it to become the structure that organizes the entire story.

There is a difference between:

“Eagles exist. I should be careful.”

and

“The sky is dangerous.”

The first is learning.

The second is an identity organized around an event.

The second is not merely a conclusion. It is a stabilization.

When something overwhelms us, the world briefly becomes less predictable than we thought it was. Identities sometimes form around such events not because they are true, but because they help reality become coherent again.

Many of the struggles we call trauma may be attempts by the psyche to answer a question that was never fully settled:

What does this event mean about the world I live in?

What does it mean about me?

Healing may not come from finding the perfect answer. It may come from gradually discovering that the event has already ended.

Not that it was insignificant.

Not that it should be forgotten.

Not that it left no mark.

Only that it happened.

It changed us.

And it is not happening now.

At some point, the event becomes part of the story rather than the thing that writes the story.

Perhaps that is what integration is.

Rock and roll has this strange ability to hold something very deep without ever becoming heavy.

There is a line in a song by Kenny Rogers:
“I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.”

It sounds almost casual, even a bit absurd.
But when you hear it, something opens.

You can follow it for a moment.
Try to see what it means.

And then it slips.

Not because there is nothing there,
but because there is too much.

Everything seems to depend on something else.
Nothing settles into a clear answer.

The song doesn’t try to fix that.

It just carries it.

So you don’t have to go all the way through it.
You don’t have to figure it out.

You can just hear it,
and let it stay as it is.

And in that, something loosens.

Not because you understood more,
but because you don’t need to.

And from there, things become a bit simpler again.

You notice what is actually in front of you.
What matters now.
What doesn’t need to be held so tightly.

Nothing is solved.

But something is lighter.

And that’s enough.

Listening to La Javanaise here, far from France, there is a strange kind of continuity.
Not geographical, not even personal in a direct way. The song belongs to a time that was already over before I ever lived there. And yet it carries something that feels intact, almost untouched by context.
It doesn’t bring back a place. It creates a space.

There is something in the way Serge Gainsbourg writes and sings, not only here, but also in Le Poinçonneur des Lilas or Bonnie and Clyde. The movement never quite settles. It turns slightly, delays, lingers just enough to avoid arriving.
The feeling is there, fully. Nothing is missing. And still it doesn’t close.

Listening to it, there’s no need to follow anything all the way through. You can stay close to it, without entering completely. Or enter, and still feel that something remains just outside.
It doesn’t ask to be resolved.

And something in you moves in the same way.
A sentence almost forms. A reaction is already there, ready to take shape. It would be simple to let it happen.
But it stays where it is.

Not held back. Not corrected. Just not taken further.
It continues for a moment, maybe longer, without turning into anything else.

And in that, nothing is lost.
The feeling doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t weaken. It remains, but differently. Not as something that needs to go somewhere, but as something that can stay.

The song keeps moving like that.
Without arriving.
Without needing to.

Yours, unchanged was recorded in Rodeo, Costa Rica, in late January and early February 2026.

It was the first record made in a new place. The songs came together quickly, without much separation between writing and recording.

The album consists of seven tracks, making it the shortest record I’ve released so far.

It belongs to the same line as the previous records. That line has always been shaped, in part, by what I was going through, but never as something I tried to define or organize.

I don’t approach a record as a way to understand or express a moment. I simply work on the songs. Whatever connects to that moment does so on its own, without being made into the point of the work.

The continuity remains, even as the surrounding circumstances change.

Yesterday I found myself looking at some of the later paintings of David Hockney.
Not the famous ones, not the ones that built his reputation decades ago, but the quieter ones.
What struck me was not only that they were beautiful, they really were, but that I suddenly had the space to see them.
It is a strange thing to notice, that the experience of beauty sometimes depends less on the artwork itself than on whether there is enough quiet inside you to receive it.

Looking at those paintings felt stabilizing in a way that is difficult to explain.
It was almost like the feeling of falling in love, but without a person.
Not falling in love with Hockney or with painting itself, but with the space that opens inside you when something resonates.
The painting enters that space, and for a moment it feels like recognition rather than admiration.

I think part of it has to do with orientation.
Knowing a little about Hockney’s life, about the early iconic work and then the decades that followed, changes the way you see the later paintings.
They don’t feel like attempts to repeat success.
They feel like someone simply continuing to work, continuing to look, continuing to make things.
In a strange way that is reassuring.
It suggests that a life can be organized around practice rather than around peaks.

What struck me most was that the connection didn’t ask anything from me.
I didn’t need to become a fan, or to claim that I understood the work, or to attach it to my identity.
It was just a moment of recognition that such a space exists, a space where perception is open and undefended.
The painting simply entered it.

Maybe that is what certain works of art really give us.
Not answers, not inspiration in the heroic sense, but the quiet confirmation that this space exists in us, and that sometimes we can live there for a moment.

I discovered The Soft Parade without knowing its story.

I didn’t grow up with the Doors, and I didn’t encounter the album as a “problem record.” I first listened to it closely years later, on vinyl, during a period of forced stillness. I wasn’t aware that it was supposed to represent a decline, a misstep, or an apology. I simply heard a record.

And it sounded alive.

What stood out wasn’t provocation or novelty, but openness. The album didn’t insist on a single identity. It moved freely: lighter at times, ceremonial at others, occasionally awkward, often generous. It felt less like a declaration and more like an allowance, as if the band had momentarily loosened its grip on what it was supposed to be.

That quality is rare. And for someone who makes things, it’s deeply inspiring.

Only later did I encounter the narrative that has surrounded the album since its release: the critical disappointment, the talk of excess, the idea that this was where the Doors lost their way before correcting course. Over time, that story hardened into consensus, repeated, refined, and eventually institutionalized.

A recent Apple Music retrospective text is a good example of how this history is now written. The album is framed as a product of exhaustion and overextension, contrasted with figures from “rock’s vanguard” who had allegedly withdrawn from touring to focus on studio work, most notably Brian Wilson. The implication is clear: retreat equals artistic health; continuation equals decline.

But this comparison quietly inverts reality.

Brian Wilson’s withdrawal during the Smile period was not a sign of creative clarity or healthy focus. It was the result of a profound psychological collapse. Smile was not delayed because it was too pure for the world; it was abandoned because its creator could not complete it. Its later mythologization has softened that fact, but it does not change it.

By contrast, The Soft Parade was finished. It was released. It contained a major hit. It coheres. It functions musically. Listening now, it does not sound like a band losing its mind. It sounds like a band loosening its boundaries.

To frame Wilson as the healthy counterexample and the Doors as the unhealthy case is not just inaccurate, it’s an inversion produced by myth.

The same Apple Music text leans heavily on contemporaneous criticism, especially from Rolling Stone, quoting Alec Dubro’s infamous dismissal about “limp wicks waving in the Miami breeze.” In its original context, that review is understandable. It was written inside a live cultural moment, under pressure, amid real tensions about authenticity, seriousness, and direction. Critics then were not neutral archivists; they were participants in a battle over meaning.

What’s harder to understand is why that language is still being repeated today, decades later, with so little reflection.

The album’s reputation was further sealed by the band’s own retreat. After The Soft Parade, the Doors moved decisively toward a back-to-basics sound on Morrison Hotel. That record is strong and needs no apology. But its placement, immediately following The Soft Parade, unintentionally framed the earlier album as a mistake in need of correction.

That framing mattered even more because Jim Morrison himself internalized it. In later interviews, Morrison spoke apologetically about the album, distancing himself from it and questioning its legitimacy. Under enormous pressure, young, already struggling with alcohol, he doubted himself. He accepted the idea that perhaps he had strayed from who he “really” was.

In hindsight, that doubt looks less like insight and more like narrowing.

Listening now, far from the moment of crisis, the album doesn’t carry the sickness it was accused of. It carries something else entirely: permission. It suggests that the next move does not have to be a correction, that identity does not have to harden under scrutiny, that seriousness is not the only measure of truth.

What history treated as indulgence feels more like breadth. What was dismissed as dilution sounds like curiosity. And what was framed as a dead end reveals itself as a possible exit, one that simply wasn’t taken.

The tragedy, if there is one, isn’t that the Doors made The Soft Parade. It’s that the door it opened was closed so quickly, and then sealed by repetition.

Today, with no careers at stake and no myths left to defend, it’s possible to listen again without urgency. And listening again changes things. The orchestration is no longer a provocation. The stylistic shifts are no longer a threat. They’re just part of the album’s movement.

This isn’t an attempt to overturn history or to declare the album secretly misunderstood. It’s simply an acknowledgment that the story we inherited is narrower than the music itself.

Some records don’t age into consensus. They age into availability.

The Soft Parade feels like one of those records, not because it was ahead of its time, but because it quietly refused to close the future.

And sometimes, that refusal is the most honest thing a work of art can offer.

Zoe Rainbow Days was recorded in Santa Ana in September and October 2025.

Some of the songs were written earlier, before I had any sense of how the following months would unfold. Others were written during that period. The album came together quickly, without much distance or reflection. Because of that, the songs don’t process what was happening so much as they sit just before it.

The record still belongs partly to an earlier continuity. By the time it was released, that continuity was already breaking, but not enough time had passed for it to fully register in the music.

The cover was drawn by hand with my daughter Zoe, and the album is dedicated to her. Working on it was a way of keeping something intact during a time when I wasn’t speaking to many people and was largely on my own. Music was the one line of continuity that didn’t depend on anyone else.

This album wasn’t made to explain anything or to mark a turning point. It simply existed, and stayed together. Looking back, that feels like its function.