Evaporate and Wonder is an ember of an ember, an echo of an echo, a ghost of a ghost, barely there yet fully present. This slowly meditative pair of tracks has all the power of a leaf floating down a lazy river, which is to say not much, or a great deal, depending on one’s perspective. Could one watch such a leaf, hopping shore to shore, stone to stone to trace its progress? Or arching backwards, to its position on the tree, its browning, its full-fledged greenery, its first appearance as a shoot, invisible veins edging toward the sun? ”Is it easier to begin or to end?” asks Dani in the poem on which the album is based: her words, her presence kept alive by her husband on this tonal recording in such a way as to make one ask, what if you didn’t have to choose? What if one were perpetually beginning and ending in a way that erased the dividing line? When Dani writes of water spilled like a life, she leaves readers with an enduring question: ”Was it worth it?” Will Long’s continuing answer is yes – it was, it is. He’s passed beyond prowess and love, and is now in a nether zone of remembrance and recycling, providing what is in essence an evaporated recording that inexplicably beats with life.