ABOUT THE ALBUM It’s truly an amazing thing to look back on the creative process of an album like Rapture. From its inception, this album was epic, with a well-defined concept and theme. When I started writing Rapture back in early 2009, I knew I wanted it to be an “album of emotions.” People had often described my earlier music as a “narrative,” which told a story. Music does tell stories, but at its heart it really is the universal language of emotion. I wanted to write music that embodied the essence of basic human emotions, at a more fundamental and instinctual level. It was this idea that sparked the album’s title, Rapture, which means “an expression or manifestation of ecstasy or passion” or “a state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion.” This album is indeed both these things, because it is literally a manifestation of passion, and was written to carry away the listener by overwhelming emotion. I had even dubbed Rapture as the “red album” long before any album artwork had been conceived, because red is the color of passion and strong emotion. Rapture is a very special album in many ways, one of which is how it was composed as a collective body of works. In the past I had composed my albums one song at a time, completing and naming a song before moving forward. Rapture is different because I decided to write the basic themes of all the songs simultaneously, before completing any one individual piece. This approach allowed me to create a more uni