Coming home from a world tour, and building a small, quiet world.
– Conrad Askland, May 2026
I was sitting alone in a coffee shop in Bruges, watching people walk past 500-year-old buildings on their cell phones. That’s The Wanderer. That’s exactly what he sees.
My last tour was three and a half years with Cirque du Soleil, across five continents. On tour, every night is just go, go, go. The arenas are loud. The energy is enormous. And then I came off of it, and I came back home, and now everything is very quiet and still.
When it came time to work on my next project, I didn’t want to do anything big and bombastic. I wanted to do something small and intimate.
The Belgium leg of the tour gave me long days off in Brussels and in Bruges. I went to the national museum in Brussels and stood in front of the great classic Flemish oil paintings. The world of The Wanderer lives in that period. 19th century Belgium.
The character is kind of an alter ego, for me and for a lot of us. Those moments where you’re in the world but you don’t quite feel part of it. You’re observing. There’s hustle and bustle around you, but you’re noticing one small thing, one small truth, and being very present.
Normally I produce music first and then put visuals to it, like a music video. This was done in reverse. I started with creating the world of the wanderer, with these snippets, these ideas I wanted to share. I made the animations first. Then I’d play them back on my computer monitor and improvise music to whatever I was watching.
That’s what created the album. It’s called, surprisingly, Piano Music from The Wanderer.
The Wanderer is over 150 video shorts. Each one runs anywhere from 12 to 25 seconds. So in theory I only needed that much music. 12 to 25 seconds. But as a musician, that’s no fun. So when I improvised the first 20 seconds of each piece, I just kept going. All of the pieces on the album are three or four minutes long.
Musically, I was pulling a little bit on French Impressionism. Many of them, to me, are also reminiscent of the New Age piano recordings from Windham Hill, which I’ve loved for many years.
Now, why did I create it?
That brings me to the concept of the river.
I lived in China for four years. One concept I learned there that was new to me is that in life, it’s like we’re flowing down a river. Imagine you’re in an inner tube. It’s a summer day. You’re floating down this beautiful river. Sometimes the river is calm. Sometimes it gets a little turbulent. There are other people in this river. From time to time, someone reaches out their hand. You hold their hand as you journey together down the river. But that’s only for a time. Either you let go, or they let go. Or there’s a fork in the river, and you go different directions.
The idea is that everything is for a time.
Don’t we spend a lot of our lives trying to make things stay the way they are, when they aren’t going to do that? Or maybe they aren’t meant to do that?
The river says: follow the things that are around you. Be part of the journey. Don’t force any part of it.
This world of a wanderer was something I needed to create for my own sanity. I have several more stories I’m working on. You’ll see them coming out on my channel.
It feels so good to share these worlds and to share stories.