Echoes of Egypt

Behind the Melody

Some childhood dreams don't disappear just because life takes you somewhere else. They simply find different ways to come back.

I've been fascinated by ancient Egypt for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I wanted to be an archaeologist—the kind uncovering temples, tombs, and pieces of lives that had been buried for thousands of years. Life ultimately took me in other directions, but my love of Egyptology never really went anywhere.

And among the Egyptian deities, Bastet was always my favorite.

Admittedly, a goddess associated with cats was probably going to have an unfair advantage with me.

Bastet was my chance to revisit that fascination through music. Rather than creating something that felt like a modern song simply about her, I wanted it to feel almost ceremonial—as though we had wandered into a moonlit temple, incense drifting through the air while drums and voices gradually rise in honor of the feline goddess.

I especially love the duality associated with Bastet: warmth, joy, home, protection, and motherhood alongside the fierce power to defend what falls under her care. Gentle doesn't necessarily mean harmless. That's a combination I find rather compelling.

The hypnotic percussion, Egyptian-inspired melodies, haunting instrumentation, and female vocal give the song the feeling of an ancient ritual gradually coming to life beneath the desert moon. Of everything in the Echoes of Egypt collection, this one is my favorite.

I never became the archaeologist who went digging through the Egyptian sands.

So apparently I brought ancient Egypt home and started writing music about it instead.

Honestly, that sounds about right.

Behind the Melody

Echoes of the Nile Temple is another piece where I wasn't trying to tell a particular story. I wanted to create the feeling of stepping inside a place where thousands of years suddenly don't seem very long at all.

I imagined an ancient Egyptian temple after dark: enormous stone columns disappearing into shadow, carved walls illuminated by flickering firelight, incense hanging in the air, and the Nile flowing quietly somewhere beyond the temple walls. Then, from deep inside, you begin to hear the drums.

The ceremonial percussion gives the piece its pulse, while haunting flute melodies and ethereal wordless vocals seem to travel through the stone corridors themselves. I wanted the sound to feel distant at times—as though we're not necessarily participating in whatever ceremony is taking place.

Perhaps we're simply overhearing something we weren't meant to hear.

That's part of what has always fascinated me about ancient Egypt. We can study the temples, translate inscriptions, identify gods and pharaohs, and reconstruct ceremonies from what remains—but we can never completely know what it felt like to stand there when those places were alive.

So this piece is my imagination filling in that missing piece.

The temple is empty now. But if stone could remember sound, perhaps this is what we would hear.