By Cheryl B. Engelhardt
As a music composer and New Age recording artist, I have discovered that the cross section of creating music and its intention is the core of my mission as a composer: to provide experience through my own experience of composing.
Which is why I made an album on a cross-country Amtrak train trip (and was the first person to do so).
I’m here to tell you the crazy story of how it all went down.
In November 2021, I was looking to book a flight to Los Angeles from New York to attend the Grammys. (It’s been a dream I’ve had for over 17 years to be nominated, and while I wasn’t that year, as a voting member of the Recording Academy, I decided to attend.)
Flights were expensive, so I joked about taking a train, which led me down a rabbit hole into discovering the world of cross-country train trips. I should know better about making jokes like this; it’s how I ended up touring seven times in Switzerland, how I ended up with a mountain guiding husband, and other bizarre manifestations that came about by simply saying something out loud.
Anyway, I was smitten with the idea of this journey, booked my ticket out, and kept it, even after the Grammys were canceled.
Then I had the thought that I could use the time on the train to create my next album, as I do well in isolated spaces with deadlines.
Where better to find creative momentum than on a train picking up speed every few hours, going from 0 to 60 or 70 miles per hour across the plains of America, up the mountains of Colorado, or along the shores of California?
The Composer
This train trip was all aligned with my mission as a composer: to create a unique and special experience for the listener, which, for me, happens most authentically when the person creating the music is having their own unique experience.
I’m not saying that I couldn’t have sat in a big studio and created truly impactful music. But my process, and why I create music, is to experience partnership with something outside of myself, and I do that better when inside a unique experience.
I was scheduled to depart on my first Amtrak leg of the trip on January 22nd of 2022.
A Room of My Own
I booked a room for the journey–Amtrak calls them “roomettes”–and I was determined to make these spaces my oasis. It is wonderful to have a private room for a variety of reasons, the least of which being that I was grieving the recent loss of one of my dearest friends and collaborators. Kevin Archambault was someone with whom I had created and produced a musical, had been a part of a dozen other musical productions, and he was that friend who saw me, all of me, who lit up a room and everyone in it no matter what was going on for him.
Having my own room on the train was a gift – it allowed me to heal and process, and also ugly cry whenever the light struck a certain way, or I was awoken from one of the many dreams where Kevin was in attendance.
The Schedule
Over the course of the outbound journey, I started composing. I created three tracks on the first day between Poughkeepsie and Chicago, which set the pace for the rest of the trip. The idea was to get to LA with a completed record, then fly home.
I decided this would be my first full-on ambient record (all sounds would be from synthesizer samples, none of the songs would have lyrics; overall, a big departure from my usual acoustic piano and vocal layering approach).
While I was on track (see what I did there?) to finish the writing, by the time I got to Chicago (19 hours in), I knew I wanted, no, needed more time. I could feel myself eat pray loving my way to a healed heart, a new direction as a New Age artist, and a much needed break from the monotonous days in my home studio.
Not even halfway through the outbound trip, I canceled my flight home and booked a return train trip, increasing my total time on a train from five days to nine. (Yes, eight nights in a sleeper car, worth every last lost wink of sleep.)
I changed trains in Chicago, then settled in for three days on the California Zephyr, the Amtrak train that would take me across the country through the Rocky Mountains.
I wrote the music mostly in my roomette while heading West. But I also took my little setup and composed in the dining cars and in observation cars when they weren’t too crowded.
Each of my roomettes seemed to be on the “right” side of the train to get the best views. During those stretches of extraordinary landscape, I put down my headphones and computer and soaked it all in. I actually cried tears of awe seeing a herd of elk running across the frozen Colorado River.
The Arrival
When I arrived in Sacramento, I switched to the Starlight Coast train for a day trip down to Los Angeles.
After arriving in Los Angeles, refreshed from a short break from the rattling and moving train, I boarded the Southwest Chief for the three day journey back to Chicago, where I switched trains for the last time, ultimately ending up back where I parked my car in Poughkeepsie, New York. I got to work on getting the album, which I call “The Passenger,” ready for its release date of April 22, 2022.
It turns out I’m not a terrible passenger, and trusting my instincts, going with the flow, and letting someone else drive opens up a lot of space for me to process, heal, and create in ways I hadn’t thought possible.
10/10 recommend lying down in a sleeper car roomette while the countryside passes by and just be a passenger.
Cheryl B. Engelhardt is a composer and songwriter.
She started her music career as an advertising and film composer in NYC, garnering several scores for nationally airing commercials before hitting the road with her pop band. Her music has also been heard on dozens of TV shows and meditation apps like Insight Timer and Simple Habit.
Cheryl’s a composer for social justice choirs and was featured in People, Harper’s Bazaar, and Forbes Magazines for her collaboration with Martin Luther King’s goddaughter, Donzaleigh Abernathy, in her song “The Listening.” Another recent project, A Seeker’s Slumber, her second New Age record that features Grammy winner Joanie Leeds, topped sales charts in 2021. Her newest endeavor in New Age is her project “The Passenger” where she is the first person to create a full album, from start to finish, on a cross-country Amtrak train journey. Cheryl is quickly becoming known as the impact-making, experiential composing, anxiety-quelling, experimental New Age artist with a bit of edge.
Cheryl is a sought-after speaker, moderating panels at SXSW, ASCAP Expo, and many universities including her alma mater of Cornell University.
If you want to read about a bus trip to NYC, try: A Sleeved Heart’s Approach