A note from the artist:

This is an album based around pain and focuses on pain that we struggle with as living beings. It came about as I struggled with pain, and the toll it took on my life mentally and emotionally, as well as the challenges I faced with religion, heartbreak, social upheavals and so on. Thus, I gave “birth” to Neuralgia. I wondered how I should communicate this in the “pop” music world, coming from the lens of a classical musician, and my inner voice said to “ just be authentic”.

Heads up, its going to get a bit “informative” here… The album consists of 12 songs. Each songs represents a “neuralgia” of some sort. For example, the song Asylum is a musical expression about trying to maintain mental sanity and finding refuge from a insane society and its constant information overload, subliminal messages, religious extremism, the mental exhaustion of social media and so much more. So, the idea here is the pain of the mind- or nousalgia. Not in the medical sense though and that will be touched on later. I view the album as I would a song cycle from the late classical and romantic periods of western classical music. Think of the cycles of Schubert (think Die schöne Müllerin) or Schumann (think his Dichterliebe or even his piano cycle Papillons) that focus on a particular theme or motif and may have several sub-topics of the main theme. This would allow me to write an album that paints an overall musical picture instead of having many different songs and stringing them together without any correlation with one another. In the mainstream music world, this would be called a concept album.

Coming up with the name of the album has been the tricky part. Neuralgia literally means ‘pain of the nerves’ or ‘nerve pain.’ It can be loosely translated to mean “pain of the senses” since nerves are how we sense the world around us. As stated before, the album is about the pain that comes with merely existing as a being on earth. I had some choices for words that could have possibly fit such as Bialgia, Vitalgia, or even Zoalgia. Each word has a Greek or Latin prefix that mean life: Bio-, vita- (Latin), and zoo-. Neuro-, is a Latin prefix meaning nerves. Each can be paired with the Greek suffix -algia which means ‘pain of’ or ‘pain relating to’. I also looked at the suffix -dynia which also means pain, but then the album title would just have a different vibe than what I envisioned. For example- Neurodynia? Biodynia? Vitadynia? Zoodynia?… Those didn’t work for me! Although, each one would literally translate to the “pain of life” or the “pain of the living”. Regardless, Neuralgia is the one that spoke most to me, and its not necessarily about the literal translation than it is the poetic and artistic meaning conveyed here… which is pain. 

I hope you enjoy the music and find it inspiring or at least entertaining.