Metaphor

Patrick has been around forever. In the 80's he played with Missing Persons (a personal favorite) and even Frank Zappa before that. His solo work takes him off in another direction - New Age. All of these songs will touch you to the core. One listen to these tracks and he will easily become your favorite "new age" artist.

This album first wafted into my ears through the Echoes radio show on Public Radio. It immediately caught my attention as being MUCH more than just so-called "ambient" or "new age" music - which I (in most cases) disdain for its lack of craft. O' Hearn, on the other hand prepares each of his tracks with the precision of a songwriter or film composer - only in this case the melodic and harmonic structures are pared down to the absolute minimum and then expanded and developed to their limits. When I originally heard this album in the 90s, I meant to buy it but never got around to it. Now, listening to it again in 2007 - 11 yrs after its release - it sounds sonically dated. That's mostly due to the type of digital samples and percussion that were available then. O'Hearn's more recent recordings sound much warmer and less "digital" by comparison. Still, the music here is rigorously beautiful and each piece, like any music really, is a "metaphor' for the private places and feelings we experience while listening. I bought only the track 'Drive", because I knew it would sound great in my car played very loud while driving home from work in the deep of the night.