When we think about legends and myths, we think about the timeless, about stories told and retold endlessly till they eventually become uprooted from linear chronology to achieve a universality that transcends time and place. The latest album from Canadian pianist, songwriter, producer, and composer Stephan Moccio meditates on humanity’s stories and inner worlds, in just under an hour of contemplative and emotionally earnest solo piano writing. Roman historian Sallustius wrote that “one may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden.” Legends, Myth and Lavender invites a deep interiority that seeks to probe those hidden realms, evoking “classical, cinematic and modern images of the human condition.” You are “forced to turn inward and to listen to yourself,” Moccio lays out, in a “Making the Album” video filmed at the Studio Miraval in Provence, France (storied for its location for Pink Floyd recordings in the 1970s as much as for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s wedding a decade ago).

Moccio notes that he hopes the album helps people “find a sense of themselves again as well”; one could speculate easily as to some of the album’s function as a deeply personal passion project. In a lateral move from his significant success as a songwriter and co-producer on some of the biggest pop hits in the past decade (Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball”; several for The Weeknd), the classically-trained musician is reconnecting with a side of his musical identity that has surely shaped his robust career so far, but perhaps was a little undernourished. The opening two tracks, “Home” and “Hollywood” suggest twin poles of rootedness and distance, the latter a nod to Moccio’s adopted Los Angeles home, but are abstract enough—like the rest of the pieces—to function as general symbols. Take a wider look, and we feel the bookends of “Home” and “Polaris”; if journeying into the album spirits you away into the kind of internal reflection Moccio encourages, the North Star comes at the end to offer a guide.

“Home” also introduces us to the two prevailing piano characters heard throughout the album: Moccio is particularly adept at coaxing an intensely warm, rounded sound from the lower end of the piano, a terra firma that offers a soothing stability to return to. Careful, almost pointillistic melodies predominate in the higher reaches, meanwhile, often in steady, unhurried broken-chord figures, a sparseness of melodic material with a fondness for repetition that invites a contemplative precision. The seventeen tracks vary in elusiveness: some hint more directly at a thematic identity—“Lavender Fields”, “Soleil de Provence”, or “A Daydream in Camelot”, for example—but mostly the connections between name and content are purposefully ambiguous. They hint at precisely what Moccio is probing through this contemplative solo musical journey: snapshots of the vagaries of the human condition, now, then, as it ever was. These emerge not as clear-cut narratives but as hazy portraits, filmy fleeting impressions of everything from the natural world to inner emotions. The gently swaying “Communion”, with its lilting meter that almost hints at a dance, and steady phrase structure, suggests nourishing rituals of coming together. Every piece is open; I hear the melancholy in the tinges of dissonance in the chords of “Nineteen Years” resolve, hymn-like; sentimental and bittersweet tones in “If I Didn’t Have You”, and the intangible mists of “Something Almost, But Not Quite” and “The Unveiling”, liquid, mellow melodies coiling around a mysterious interior. There is a delicateness to Moccio’s writing that masks its roiling emotions; “Nightingale”, for instance, alludes not to a charming songbird but to conflicting emotions of secrecy and danger of the night.

It brings to mind the approach in Claude Debussy’s set of 24 piano Préludes, where his elusive titles are hidden as a postscript to each piece, complete with tantalizing ellipses—“(...Brouillards [fog])” or “(...Feuilles mortes [dead leaves])”—refraining from imposing connotations, encouraging a pleasurable uncertainty. The “impressionist” descriptor often popularly attached to the French composer’s work is flimsier than we should accept—music just doesn’t work the same as painting. What happens in Debussy, and in Moccio’s music, is not a direct mimetic relationship of sounds to images but an open mesh of possibilities—to borrow a phrase from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorizing of queer sexualities—that can seem endlessly suggestive, not just of images but of sensations, of memories, odours, of perceived and felt emotions.  

Though we hear some effects, and the odd soft drumbeat (in the heart-thumping of “The Wanderer”), Moccio notes his decision to deliberately eschew electronic instruments, “because I want to feel the resonance of my hands touching an acoustic, analog instrument.” This is not unusual for a solo piano album, but indicative of the significance he attaches to the peripheral aspects of his composition and recording process; he endows the physical space of the studio and the natural environment in which he embedded himself with immense meaning. It feels odd to be writing about this album in heady warm early summer days: composed and recorded in the latter months of 2023, there is something very wintry about it, where the season signals a retreat inwards; where its coolness comes from ice crystals on thin branches, of dead leaves underfoot, and its warmth from woody interiors, from hearths and fires, not the burning summer sun and the scorched brush of a southern French summer. Similarly, it’s an album that almost feels like it exists only at twilight, in the liminal, crepuscular space between sunset and dark night. But its meditative space can emerge for every season and time, any moment in which we find ourselves in need of a push to “feel more, think less,” as Moccio bids us.

Legends is not exactly radically shaking up the world of contemporary piano composition, but neither can its prevailing soothing aura be easily dismissed as light listening. A fondness for repeated patterns and phrases, and a preference for layered but generally uncomplicated melodic structures, sets it in the classical-adjacent, piano-forward scene (think Luke Howard, or Hania Rani, even Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi). Though sometimes this genre gets relegated to the background—often as an aid to study, focus, or sleep, if you peruse streaming services—Moccio’s playing bids concentration. He draws you not into a world he has fabricated, but one he invites you to (re)construct for yourself.