Once I realized I wasn't going to be swept away in the sea of people in Japan and started getting comfortable with the trains, the thing I was most nervous about was visiting Hiroshima. The weight of what happened there, what my own country was responsible for: it really made me incredibly anxious. But I also felt that it was absolutely necessary.

I read about the bombing on the train ride there. About the hundreds of thousands of civilians who died. The bomb was meant to detonate above a bridge. It caught the wind and detonated above a hospital. I suppose it didn't matter much, though: 80,000 people died in an instant. A single flash of light, 80,000 souls. Estimates have the total death toll up to 126,000 civilians, either in the initial blast, the fires that engulfed the city made of largely wooden structures, or the radiation poisoning that followed.

All of that was in my mind as I got off that train. And I was sick in my heart to think of that singular moment in suffering. That was the moment humanity realized we were so powerful that we could wipe ourselves out. That was the moment we finally held our fate squarely in our own hands. Nothing like it has happened since.

But that was not my experience of Hiroshima. Once there I saw a place that was vibrant and friendly. They welcomed me with smiles, warm glances. Children and their parents played in Peace Memorial gardens. Lovers walked hand in hand down the streets. People laughed and enjoyed life more distinctly than anywhere else I have seen in Japan. Maybe than I've ever seen anywhere. It was overwhelmingly one of the most profound experiences of my life.

I desperately wanted the music to reflect that experience. I thought of it more as a responsibility to represent it correctly, with the full weight and beauty viscerally present. I brought in my friend Dan Gomby on alto sax, who would later accompany me on a tour to Japan in 2017. I told him to make it uplifting, to make it surreal.

I've always considered this the emotional cornerstone of the album. Maybe of my 20s.