Source Note 007 · October 21, 2026
I Am Not the Radio
A poem about consciousness, dreams, and the possibility that the body may be a receiver rather than the source.
Sometimes an entire song begins with one image.
I came across a comment on YouTube suggesting that perhaps we struggle to understand consciousness and dreams because we are looking in the wrong place. The comment compared studying the brain to taking apart a radio in an attempt to discover how it creates the music coming through it.
I do not know whether that idea is literally true. What stayed with me was the metaphor.
What if the mind is not the source of consciousness, but something that receives it? What if dreams, imagination, and the persistent sense of an observer within us are not merely products of the machinery, but signals passing through it?
Those questions became “I Am Not the Radio.” The poem does not try to resolve the mystery. It follows it, moving from the electrical activity beneath the skin to dreams, identity, mortality, and the question of whether the music continues after the vessel can no longer carry it.
The finished track is also a first for Dust & Clay. Until now, the project’s songs have used generated voices. For this recording, I used my own voice with AI tools, bringing another piece of myself into the experiment.
There is something fitting about using my voice for a song that asks where the voice inside us actually comes from. The technology changes what the voice can become, but the question at its center remains deeply human:
If you break the radio,
does the music die?
The source poem
I Am Not the Radio
Can you hear me?
Somewhere in the silence,
something is coming through.
I woke inside a mystery,
a thousand thoughts
that do not belong to me,
a little lightning
underneath my skin.
But who is the one
who's listening?
They say the mind
is only a machine,
a chemical reaction
making dreams.
But when I close my eyes,
I see a world
that should not fit
inside of me.
What if we are more
than flesh and bone?
What if the signal
comes from somewhere
we cannot name?
I have spent my life
searching for the source,
when all along
I was never the radio.
Only the place
the music passes through.
A little piece
of the great unknown
dancing in a body
I call home.
Last night
I flew without wings.
Walked through a thousand
impossible things.
I met a stranger
wearing my face
who told me,
You never really
left this place.
So where do we go
when we dream?
Who paints the pictures
that we see?
And if this body
is all I am,
who is the one
who says
I am?
Maybe the brain
is an antenna,
tuning itself
toward forever.
Maybe every heartbeat
is an echo
of a song
we have always known.
If you break the radio,
does the music die?
Or does it keep traveling
somewhere beyond the sky?
Maybe we are the ocean
thinking we are the wave.
Maybe we are forever
borrowing a name.
Listen.
Underneath the noise.
Before the first thought.
Before the first voice.
Something is there.
Something
we do not yet know.
And when this vessel
finally lets me go,
I wonder:
will the music
carry on?
Will it move
through some other silence,
looking for somewhere
to be heard?
I am not the signal.
I am not the song.
I am only here,
for a little while,
where the music goes.