Sometimes at night fireflies light up; and so we catch them and put them in a jar. Living beings they are, and lamps they become until they burn out and die. They serve one purpose--to entertain. A song holds within itself a certain power of the same measure. When it is created, it holds captive the thoughts and ideas, emotions and inner turmoil of its creator...over time the song grows and evolves, and though it may mean different things to different people, its final end is to give the listener pleasure. And so, here you are - my jar of fireflies.

"Invisible War" is my first jar...a collection of some of the first fireflies I ever caught; mostly they were just sprouting their wings in that time, learning all about life, exploring the world, and frolicking about with me in fascinating places like Mongolia, where I lived until I was eight. Really I caught the first specimen in this particular jar when I was fifteen - "Song of the Open Road" - based on the Whitman poem of the same name.

Now, at 21, I'm always chasing around a few fireflies at a time, attempting to master the art of capturing the most elaborate creatures. The idea is that the better the creature, the longer it will stay alive and the brighter its light will shine. We need bright light, see, because it's dark sometimes, very dark.

I have dreams about how the world should be. Indeed we live in a place which was meant to be beautiful; though we oftentimes ruin it ourselves by default. In science there is the idea of entropy - the tendency of things toward disorder. If a vase is sitting on a little table, it's quite probable that it could fall off and shatter into a hundred pieces, if not rather unlikely that all those pieces would jump back together again and shape themselves once again into a beautiful vase--unless of course someone worked very hard to glue it all back together into something new and different.

Unfortunately the implications of this in real life are much more complicated than a single vase shattering to the ground. We see natural disasters that destroy and reshape lives; wars, rumors of wars that create tension and dissension between people groups; poverty, disease, starvation, and everything that lies between.

These are the things which burden my heart, and the things which I've always felt compelled to express through my music. If all I do in life is shine a little light into the dark spaces of the world, my time on earth will certainly not have been wasted.

So I catch fireflies.

Here's a short quote about Invisible War - "Merry Ellen's CD is excellent. I like the single "Blinding Me" the best. It fits her voice and style of delivery to great effect I think?"
- Mark Isham, Grammy, Emmy, and Clio Award Winning Film Score Composer (Crash, October Sky, Fly Away Home, Of Mice and Men)