Reading, Resting, Relaxing: Living With Piano Reveries

Most albums want something from you. They want your full attention, your volume knob turned up, your whole evening. Piano Reveries is a little different — it’s twenty-two solo piano pieces that are perfectly happy to sit in the background of your life while you get on with reading, working, cooking, or doing absolutely nothing at all. This is a short guide to actually living with the album: when to put it on, what to expect, and which corners of it suit which parts of a day.

An album that supports, not demands

There’s a particular kind of music that fills a room without crowding it. No vocals to follow, no drop to brace for, no lyrics competing with the sentence you’re trying to read. Just a piano, played with a light hand, in a space where the notes have room to ring out and fade.

That’s the register this whole record sits in. Pieces like Play in the Grass and The Joy in Life are bright and easy without being sugary, and something like Lovely Night settles the temperature of a room almost immediately. You can pay close attention and find plenty to enjoy — but you don’t have to. The album works just as well as weather.

That’s not an accident of genre, either. Michael Clinesmith writes music for games as well as for the concert-ish setting of a solo album, and game scoring is an entire craft built around music that has to be good while never stealing focus from what the player is actually doing. Some of that instinct carries straight over here.

Reading and writing alongside the music

If you read, this is the use case the album was practically built for.

Instrumental piano is the safest possible companion to text — nothing is asking your language brain to do two jobs at once. Start with the gentler end of the tracklist. Jade’s Lullaby is exactly what its title suggests, unhurried and tender. After the Storm has a settled, exhaled quality that works beautifully for a long stretch of pages. For Grandma carries real warmth without ever raising its voice.

For focused work — writing, admin, studying, the sort of thing where you need momentum rather than calm — nudge toward the pieces with a bit more pulse. Step and Dance and Dance in D keep things moving. Race does what the name promises and is genuinely useful when you’re trying to finish something before you lose the thread. Joyous is a good pick-me-up somewhere around the middle of a long afternoon.

And for the days that are simply hard, Working Through It is honest about that, and The Sun Will Rise Again is a decent note to end on.

Winding down at the end of a day

Evening listening is a different job. You’re not trying to focus — you’re trying to stop.

The trick here is volume more than track selection. Solo piano at low volume does something that almost nothing else does: it stays interesting at a level where you can still hear the kettle, the rain, or someone talking in the next room. Turn it down further than feels right, and it becomes part of the room rather than an event in it.

The quieter, more reflective pieces carry this best. Minor Major has a lovely ambiguity to it — not sad exactly, just thoughtful. Melody in C is simple and unfussy in the best way. Put those on while you’re washing up or reading in a chair and the day tends to loosen its grip a little faster.

It also holds up as company for a house that isn’t empty. The album is entirely instrumental and never spikes in volume, so it can play through a shared room while one person reads and another cooks without either of them having to negotiate about it. That’s a genuinely underrated quality in a record.

Letting all 22 tracks of Piano Reveries run in order

Every so often, do the old-fashioned thing: press play on track one and let the whole of Piano Reveries run.

Twenty-two pieces is a real sit — a proper afternoon’s worth. And the sequence rewards it, because the record moves through moods rather than staying in one. Bright pieces give way to reflective ones, dance-like pieces to still ones, and the three movements of the Sonatina in G sit in there as the album’s most structurally ambitious stretch — a small classical form dropped into the middle of a collection of shorter character pieces. It’s the moment where you can most clearly hear a composer rather than just a mood.

You’ll also find that tracks you skipped past on shuffle land completely differently in sequence. Bouncing Left Hand and Two Beat make more sense as texture between bigger pieces than they do standing alone. That’s how the record was ordered, and it’s worth hearing at least once the way it was laid out.

You can preview every one of the twenty-two tracks, and buy the album, on the music page.

Put it on and press play

The nice thing about an album like this is that it asks for almost nothing. There’s no right way to listen. Put it on while you read, while you work, while you cook, or while you sit down for the first time all day — it’ll meet you wherever you are.

If you want to go further into the world it came from, there’s plenty of it. The RPG Rebellion is on Steam with its own soundtrack DLC — a different, more dramatic side of the same composer. New music and behind-the-scenes bits go up on YouTube. If you play piano yourself, sheet music is available through Sheet Music Plus and Sheet Music Direct. If you’re working on a game, a film, or a project of your own that needs music, Michael takes commissions through SoundBetter. And if you’d like to help keep independent music like this getting made, Patreon is the most direct way to do it — supporters get early listens and a look behind the curtain.

There’s also Airy the Dragon somewhere in all of this, cheerfully insisting the studio doesn’t take itself too seriously.

If this resonated, you can listen to and buy Piano Reveries, learn more about the music, or get in touch about a custom score.