DAVID LANZ’S CAROUSEL: Childhood Dreams, Life’s Seasons and the Fullness of Time

There are moments in an artist’s life when looking backward becomes a way of discovering how vividly the past still lives within us, its memories, emotions and dreams continuing to shape the present. On Carousel, David Lanz turns toward childhood, family, nature, the changing seasons and the passage of time, but he approaches all of them not from a distance but as familiar, living presences. From the childlike exhilaration of the opening title track to the deeply reflective “In the Fullness of Time,” the pianist/composer steps inside those memories and inhabits them again—the spinning joy of a carousel with his young twin daughters, the fantasy of being a five-year-old pirate, the freedom of summer, the melancholy of autumn and the quiet contemplation of December.

With the Deluxe Edition adding two chapters to his musical pirate tale and spoken commentary that opens the door behind each composition, the album is more than another beautifully realized chapter in Lanz’s 40+ year solo piano legacy. The repertoire evolves as a conversation between the child he was, the father he is and the seasoned artist looking across decades of music and life and asking what remains, how we have changed and where possibility still lies. The result is one of his most immersive and revealing works, precisely because experience and innocence coexist so naturally within its unfolding journey.

“Carousel” immediately establishes that vibrant duality. Its buoyant motif seems to spin into motion almost before we have time to settle into it, with charming stop-and-start phrases, darker lower-register accents and increasingly animated upper-register figures creating the sensation of a carousel gathering momentum. The music is sweet without becoming saccharine, elegant without losing its childlike sense of fun, and emotionally layered in Lanz’s unmistakable fashion. Midway through, it slows and briefly pauses before beginning again, an effect that makes perfect sense once Lanz explains its very personal inspiration. He used to play a game called “round and round” with his twin daughters, Estella and Lia, holding their hands and spinning them in circles until somebody became dizzy—usually, he jokes, that somebody was their father.

Listened to simply as a piece of music, “Carousel” is a joyful evocation of childhood; knowing its origin adds another dimension, because the game itself has already become a memory. Lanz acknowledges that listeners may hear the carousel as a metaphor for life’s cycles, something that becomes easier to contemplate with age, but its original impulse was simply the delight of being a father.

That connection between music and memory deepens further through the Deluxe Edition’s spoken commentary. Lanz grew up in an era when albums came with substantial liner notes and artists took time to explain where their music came from. He had already begun writing impressionistic thoughts about the Carousel pieces when he realized that an audio version might offer listeners something more self-reflective than conventional social media posts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAdCVhQ0f7w

“Whenever I’ve made a record, at least with the solo piano pieces, I spend a lot of time writing liner notes, thinking someone might be interested,” he says. “I grew up in that era. Nowadays you get a song on a playlist and the artist becomes an innocuous background thing. The commentary gives them a feeling of looking behind the curtain, behind the scenes, thinking of where the music must come from and what it means to me. It sets the stage a little better, so people want to have their own thoughts and just listen. They will have their own feelings of the four seasons or little images of pirates, then it’s like a jump start to have their own experience.”

That narrative flow moves most deeply through “Suite Seasons,” the four pieces that gradually revealed themselves as the heart of Carousel. Lanz did not initially set out to write a four-part seasonal cycle. “Autumn Ayre” was an older piece he rediscovered while looking through sketches, while another composition struck him as having the appropriate character for December. Two additional pieces gradually revealed themselves as companions.

 “It was a slow, organic process of putting them together. I wasn’t really conceiving it as writing music for four seasons,” he says “The four seasons, the cyclic nature of time, kind of brought me back to thinking about how I’ve experienced the four seasons starting as a child,” he adds. “Being in summertime, walking in forests that were cool, and how seasons are unique—different images came to mind. It’s reflective of how they have been throughout my life.”

“April Ayre” captures the awakening of nature through delicate upper-register figures and graceful movement beneath darker chords, while “Summer Ayre” feels freer and more expansive, recalling childhood days that seemed endless. By “Autumn Ayre,” the music has turned darker and more introspective, evoking leaves changing color, fading sunlight and memories of warmer days. “December Ayre” is quieter still, its spacious phrases suggesting falling snow and the pauses that come when we stop to consider where another year has gone. The suite becomes a musical progression from emergence to abundance to remembrance and finally quiet.

Lanz’s connection to spring is particularly revealing because he sees it as both a natural and creative renewal. “Almost every album I’ve done begun or recorded in spring,” he reflects. “There’s that kind of energy for all of us. We get through Christmas and the holidays and a little sludge in the system. Spring is symbolic of new life, out of nature with buds and flowers, but also this natural rhythm that starts. People start to come alive in a different way. My creative juices get flowing in springtime.”

That energy gives way to the freedom of summer, the layered shadows of autumn and the hushed reflection of winter. What makes the suite so moving is that Lanz is not simply painting four landscapes. He is considering how the meaning of those landscapes changes as we grow older.

Carousel also revisits several important works Lanz had previously created with his musical and creative partner Kristin Amarie. “Aria Nova” and “Sonata (Reprise)” both began as piano pieces before becoming vocal works performed by Amarie, with “Sonata” also featuring Cyprus based vocalist Alex Panayi. Returning to their instrumental origins reveals how fully formed the piano compositions were before the voices entered the picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZnDcozV3lw

“I definitely hear the vocal part, Kristin’s singing,” Lanz says of “Aria Nova.” “But because of the way the voice works versus the way the piano works, there were certain phrases I needed to adapt just to the piano. You can hit a note, swoop up or down or change when you’re singing, but you can’t do that on piano. I needed to adapt to make it more pianistic, but her voice was definitely in my ear as I was playing the pieces.”

“Sonata (Reprise)” carries the same dramatic depth of its earlier vocal incarnation, but the piano now conveys the drama on its own. “When I wrote them on the piano, they adapted the vocals to what I had written,” he explains. “The piano composition was already strong. The through line of the piano was always elemental to the song.”

Carousel then turns toward another childhood world dear to the pianist: pirates. A Pirate’s Tale grew from Lanz’s memories of dressing up around age five with a cardboard sword, eye patch and one of his mother’s colorful scarves. His childhood imagination was theatrical long before he became a professional musician, and the pirate pieces preserve that sense of play while filtering it through an adult musical vocabulary.

“Beyond Silver Shores,” newly added to the Deluxe Edition, begins the voyage with an elegant, spacious melody suggesting dawn over the sea, while “Home at Sea” and “Waves of Gold” move between buoyant nautical energy and darker tones suggesting the danger beneath the adventure. “Treasure Chest” is the joyous payoff, a spirited, percussive and almost mischievous romp that sounds like a crew celebrating after finally discovering its treasure.

Lanz originally wondered whether that song’s unabashed exuberance belonged on the album. “That’s why I saved it as a bonus track,” he says. “It would have fit more on my earlier album Skyline Firedance with its big energy. Initially it didn’t seem to fit as well. It doesn’t have that inward looking quality. It’s part of the suite, but someday I will take this suite and record it with orchestra. That’s my long-term, expensive plan.” In the context of the Deluxe Edition, though, “Treasure Chest” becomes essential because it restores something the more reflective pieces might otherwise leave behind: pure, uncomplicated fun.

All these threads eventually converge in “In the Fullness of Time,” a quiet, soulful piece whose graceful piano lines seem to pause over memory, childhood and the passage of time. Lanz’s high-register phrases float above shadowy tones, while pauses and returning motifs create the sensation of time moving forward while the mind periodically looks back. “On most of my albums, the last piece encapsulates a lot of these different stories and has a meditative, introspective feeling, a way to leave the listener—they can drift off to sleep. It lets everybody down easy and ties a lot of things together,” he says. “It always felt like the last song. It was one of these pieces that came on its own without any thinking about this or that. The song developed almost fully, and as I was listening to it, the title came to mind. The song named itself.” After the carousel, the seasons and voyage into childhood fantasy, that title becomes a quiet philosophical statement about everything time gives us and everything it takes away.

Lanz is remarkably candid about where he stands after decades of creating music. He admits there are days when he wonders whether he has anything left to say. During a recent family trip to Istanbul, away from his piano and normal creative environment, he listened to his entire catalog and sat with that question. “Life is funny,” he says. “It feels like the music I’ve written is a reflection of where I was at the times I was composing it. This record is no different, but now there’s been a lot more water under the bridge, so much more to draw from. It works both ways. On one hand, there are many more experiences I can be inspired by; on the other hand, some days I feel like I’m wrung out. I go, look, the Beatles did seven albums. I’ve got forty. When do I get a break?”

Lanz’s creative impulse quickly returned. “I had this one day in a dark place, woke up and felt like I needed a vision,” he muses. “I started thinking about that one thing and so I came home and finished a piece called ‘On the Threshold’—just at a point where something is going somewhere, going into a new phase, but not there yet.”

That anecdote may be the most telling reflection on Carousel: an album deeply engaged with memory that ultimately points forward. It’s a realm where the carousel keeps turning. The seasons circle back. The pirate ship eventually finds its way home. Memories disappear and return. Children grow. Artists age. And still, somewhere in the silence between one thought and the next, another melody begins. For David Lanz, after decades of making music, that next horizon remains open—and the piano, as it has been for so much of his life, is still waiting there, ripe for new discoveries.