A few weeks into my family’s move to Barcelona, I woke up in the middle of an incredibly vivid dream. In the dream, I was wearing a black unitard and was on stage in a small, black-box type theater. With me were Josh, Ian, and Harrison–my three original bandmates in The Unbearables, before we exploded in membership and became a Sufjan Stevens-inspired rock orchestra. For some reason, we were all performing a dance together, and for some other reason, they had all learned the steps but I hadn’t had time to practice with them or something. So I spent the entire performance trying to watch them out of the corner of my eye, copying their steps as they moved. I kept screwing up visibly, and at one point Harrison hissed at me under his breath something like “Didn’t you practice this?!” Did I mention we were all wearing black unitards?

Anyway, while all this was going on, there was a song that was playing that I’d never heard before. I awoke humming the melody, with a pretty clear idea of how the instruments playing the melody sounded. It had this really distinct early ’80s synth vibe, complete with that huge snare drum sound that you always heard on records produced in that decade. I grabbed the first instrument that came to hand and started playing the melody, figured out its harmony, and so on. And then I got to work. Honestly, nothing like this has ever happened to me. It’s kinda cool that the first decent piece of art to come to me in a dream came from an anxiety dream. At least I’m getting something out of it, right?

Anyway, here’s the piece, appropriately entitled “An Awkward Dance, Where You Don’t Know the Steps.” If anyone I know happens to have choreography skills, and wants to create a dance to this piece for four men in black unitards, including one who is clearly doing the dance for the first time (and has no dancing ability), that would literally make my dream come true.