With over 1 billion streams, 70 featured albums, and 5 Grammy nominations, David Arkenstone could be forgiven for resting on his laurels. Instead, he has just released an epic new concept album, Quest for the Runestone. The album transports listeners to a land of myth and legend, following the heroine’s journey through a soundscape of aching beauty, pounding drums, and ultimate triumph.
David is excited about the album, saying, “I think it’s some of the best stuff. I mean, I probably think that after every album, but this one’s different in a way because I had so many people who helped me with it, recording it, bringing their artistry to the book, working with my son, it was just, it’s super special.”
Fantasy and storytelling have always been important to David, as evidenced by previous albums like Avalon: Between Earth and Sky and Music Inspired by Middle Earth, where he explores beloved legends. In the Wake of the Wind marked “the start of my love of doing conceptual records, where I’m sort of doing a soundtrack to a film in my head.” With Quest for the Runestone, he takes this concept a step further. The physical album includes a 48-page booklet with a story about the quest. “I asked my son, who’s a writer, if he wanted to write a story. He just came up with a story that was unreal to me, I didn’t expect it to be so rich, I guess. I figured it would be good but it just became rich.” The story and characters became his “blueprint.”
One of the first steps David takes musically is to decide on his musical ‘palette’—or more importantly, what not to include. “On this album, it’s got folk influences from Northern Scandinavia, it’s got Celtic influences, and then it’s got sort of cinematic influences… so I knew there wouldn’t be any saxophone or a lot of other things like that. That family wasn’t going to belong in that palette. I used a lot of stringed instruments and drums, I concentrated on that a lot more. We had a hurdy-gurdy on there, and we had the Hardanger fiddle, which is a fiddle from Norway that has sympathetic strings on it. So when the player plays their notes, the other strings vibrate, and it creates this really cool kind of sound. Then we had the uilleann pipes from Ireland… and so the whole album had a sort of Northern feel.”
The album features longtime collaborator Luanne Homzy on strings, Clara Sorace on vocals, and famed piper Eric Rigler (known for Titanic and Braveheart), among others. Hearing the music move from the digital drawing board to being played by these artists is one of David’s favorite parts of creating a new project. “The keyboard is linked to a computer with pretty much every sound known to man. I have a lot of libraries with sounds, and some of them are incredible and closer to an orchestra than I ever thought I’d be able to do in my own studio. So my demos are pretty. When I’m going to give a demo to somebody like, let’s take Eric, for example, I have an uilleann pipe sample, but it’s really sketchy. It’s good enough to get an idea of what it’s going to sound like, and I can put it in the key that I know it can play in… but then he gets it, and listens to it, and then turns the guide track off and just puts—I can only call it soul, really—he puts his soul into it, into the part, into the way he plays his instrument, and you cannot get that from a keyboard. It just doesn’t happen on that instrument, or the violin. Same with Luanne, I’ll write a part out, she’ll see the notes. It’s like, ‘Okay, it’s like a starting point,’ and then off she goes, and she puts her soul into it. Same with the vocalist, Clara. You can tell them what you’d like, and then they elevate it somehow into something that’s more than you even kind of dreamed was possible. I think I’m always blown away by their talents, which is, I guess, why I keep calling them.”
For David, it’s always about exploration, and this album allowed him to do exactly that. “I’ve never written anything for the hurdy-gurdy, which is a medieval kind of instrument with a crank. It basically has a wheel that vibrates violin strings, viola strings, whatever they are. I’ve never done anything for that instrument. I had to look into it because I knew I wanted the sound, so I had to look into how somebody could play that. I found an incredible player to do that through another friend of mine, and I was lucky there too because he also added things that were not on the sheet music, which I love.” This album also relies on the human voice in a way that David has rarely done in the past. “Part of the story has to do with singing, and so I found a singer, Clara Sorace, and she just brought some amazing vocals… that fit the album just perfectly. And so I had to think about writing for that, which I don’t normally do, but it’s fun to push yourself.” David also took “every drum I owned out of storage” for the album. His exploration has various starting points—not always the keyboard. He says, “Depending on what I used to write the song or start the song, then it’ll end up being a sort of a different kind of exploration. And wow, it never ends. Really. Luckily.”
The consumption of music in recent years has changed tremendously, and David knows that some will discover his music through playlists rather than listening to the entire album as it was designed to be played. “People love taking mood journeys now. Sometimes the particular artist doesn’t matter so much. I’m on the fence, whether I like that or not. I mean, I still get exposed to new music because I do listen to playlists once in a while, especially if I’m not in the studio or I’m in the car.”
Quest for the Runestone is an album that deserves more than a cursory listen, and for David, he wants to bring listeners on a unique journey. “I was trying to go back to the time when people would listen to an entire album at the same time without jumping around, which harkens back to LPs. When you put an LP on, it’s very tactile, you have to participate in some manner. Whether you put the needle on or the machine puts the needle on, that thing runs the whole album side, even if you’re washing dishes or something, but sometimes you’re on the couch looking at the big artwork that they used to have or reading lyrics or whatever, but it was more of a participatory experience. I think that’s why vinyl is coming back in a big way. Because people, a lot of people, especially younger people, have never experienced that. They grew up with streaming… I wanted this to be sit down and listen to the whole thing, if you can… it has a story, the songs make sense, even if you’re not reading the story, or even if you don’t know the story, but the music is connected. It’s a richer experience if you do have the opportunity to listen to the album at one time and you get more of what I was trying to illustrate.”
David will begin his winter tour in December, and during his downtime from promoting the album, he plans to satisfy his love for traveling with a trip to Portugal. “Travel is always inspirational for me, and even when I can’t travel, I travel through my music. Like the Runestone story, it was easy to visualize myself in a snowy mountain range, or going through these trials and tribulations, and so I travel. I’m an armchair music traveler, for sure.”
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