Hello.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to this collection of sounds and words and feelings. It means so much to me that anybody would spend time to connect with my creative impulses.

I kind of feel like writing and recording an album is a strange thing for me to do, especially these days. I peruse Instagram and every other post I see is somebody announcing their new album, telling me to pre-save their songs or promising a “big announcement” the next day. It’s exhausting and I feel a little guilty making one more thing for people to consume because we really don’t need more content and we definitely don’t need more pop-rock records.
Nevertheless, here it is. It exists. I’ve made sure of it!

The first line on this album is “Free me, break me. Fill me up with all your holy water cause’ I’m driving drunk in the night with one headlight.” You may wonder what I mean by this.
Well, if you can’t tell, this is a prayer. It’s a plea to God to help me be better and healthier and truer than whatever it is I am now as I careen recklessly through this frantic, modern existence. I started with this line because it’s the prayer I pray (in different words) every day of my life. “Help me because without You I’m…well, I’m something other than what I want to be; drunk and reckless in my self-propelled chaos.”

I feel this deeply in some space I can’t define with words I’ve never read.

It’s a similar abstract feeling that keeps me up at night in the months before I release an album. It’s an unspoken sense that I’ve grossly overestimated the importance of my own creativity.
There is definitely some truth in this feeling, but I also realize that art is important and that there are, it seems, some people who connect with my art and draw strength and inspiration from it. I should say right here and now that I am deeply humbled and honored when someone finds my art “life-giving”.

However, there is something important here that I must dissect at this moment. I have learned the hard way that glorifying myself leads to nothing short of emptiness. It’s a road to dissatisfied stagnation. The contemporary artist relentlessly beams their likeness to our phones, screaming at us to gobble up their monetized self-expression. I am guilty of this because our culture tells me this is good and normal and that it’s a necessity to survival. In fact, survival of the fittest is an apt descriptor for this cannibalistic internet ecosystem for which most creative makers must exist.

I don’t like what it does in me. And yet, here I am making a precarious peace with it because I need it in order to share this thing I have made with you.

But by writing this preface I am given the chance to set the record straight in one way or another.

So.
A couple of things I believe to be true:
I have not created myself.
I have not gifted existence to myself.
I have not birthed time and I have not maintained this reality within my being.
I am not the fixed center point. I am not impervious to the law of relativity.

Even though I’ve made an album about my life, I recognize that it’s “not about me” in as much as a tree’s existence is about the tree.

The point of this rambling is to simply say that deep inside of me there is something whispering, “To God Be The Glory”. I am just so tired of anything else and though I may wander from this creed I always find myself back at its foundation after some self-reflection.
Bombarded by advertising, feasted upon by the vulture of consumerism, I lay half-dead in no-man’s land crying out for something truer that isn’t about me and my need to be seen and heard and filled and adored. Our world says it’s all about us and what we need. Again, I hate what this does in me.

So even though I feel weighed down by this process, I still release new music because it’s what I do. I write songs to feel normal and to process what I’m going through in this life.

I am aware that this album won’t connect with everyone. Secular listeners may find it too spiritual and Christian listeners may find it too spiritually vague. I guess that’s kind of the point, though; it reflects how I feel in this world right now. As my friend Dick Staub says, “Too Christian; Too Pagan.” I feel unsure of where I belong.

Even though I exist in this misty tension as an artist I still need to say: God is God and I am not.

I am origami because I am a substance folded to become something greater than my makeup. But I am not the hand folding the paper, I am only the paper; a created thing that owes all glory and honor and power to my Maker. That’s how I see it.

I’d appreciate it if you see all four albums as one big piece of work, too; one set compiled of an origami crane, flower, boat and dragon; all made from the same paper.

But you know what? It’s OK if you don’t. I’d rather you concern yourself with greater and more important things like being kind to your neighbor and learning to garden and pondering upon the mystery of gravity and feeling your way to a correct creature/Creator paradigm.

And now the (I Am) Origami project is complete. It is finished and I am happy.

As I said before, thanks for listening.

Sincerely

John Van Deusen