The piano at the center of Sheer Dominion was never supposed to become a song.
I wrote its main melody and solo in 2020, during the COVID lockdowns. I played it as a human being living through an isolating, uncertain moment—not as a polished session player preparing a part for release. The timing is not perfect. Every note is not clinically exact. That is the point.
The small hesitations, the pressure of the keys, and the way the melody moves under my hands give it character. They are evidence of the person behind the work.
Years later, while building the song that became Sheer Dominion, I realized that old piano performance already belonged inside it. I brought it back from the archives and wrote the song around it. The piano was not added as decoration after the track was finished. It became the foundation the rest of the recording had to answer.
That mattered because Sheer Dominion is more than a title shared by a book and a song.
I wrote the novel as Vesper Denier. I built its rooms, its rules, its tensions, and the women who move through them. Aurelia began inside that world before she became a recording identity with a voice of her own. In this song, those parts of my work meet: the author who built the world, the character who stepped out of it, and the musician whose hands were already waiting in an old recording.
The AI-assisted voice did not create that history. It gave me another medium through which to shape and perform it. The character of the full song comes from the choices around that voice—and, at its center, from a piano performance that could only have come from the life I had already lived.
I never intended to release that melody. It simply fit. So I resurrected it, listened to what it had been holding since 2020, and built the song around it.
Its imperfections are not something I need to hide. They are where I am in the recording.
— Jacqueline L Waters