Track Spotlight: "Working Through It" and the Sound of Resolve

Most album titles tell you what a piece sounds like. Working Through It tells you what it’s doing. It sits at track twenty on Michael Clinesmith’s 22-track solo piano album Piano Reveries, runs a full five minutes and four seconds, and is tagged on the album as a thematic piece — a fitting label for determined piano music that isn’t in any hurry to reach the other side of the difficulty it’s describing.

The sound of pushing forward

There’s a particular kind of music that gets written about effort, and most of it cheats. It starts hard, then hands you a big triumphant lift about ninety seconds in, and everyone goes home feeling like the problem got solved off-screen.

Five minutes is a long time for a solo piano miniature, and the length is the first clue that this piece isn’t taking that shortcut. It’s one of the longest tracks on the record — longer than For Grandma, more than twice the length of Race, and longer than several of the album’s bright, kinetic pieces put together. Length in solo piano writing isn’t decoration. It’s commitment. If you’re going to spend five minutes with one idea and ten fingers, you have to actually stay inside the feeling rather than gesture at it and move on.

That’s what “working through” means as a phrase, after all. Not solving. Not escaping. Working through — the slow, unglamorous middle part where the only available strategy is to keep going.

Quiet resolve instead of triumph

Solo piano is a merciless format for this subject. There’s no string section to swell underneath you and announce that the hard part is over. There’s no drum kit to manufacture momentum. Whatever forward motion the piece has, the left hand has to earn.

That constraint turns out to be the point. Resolve, in real life, doesn’t sound like a fanfare. It sounds like the same steady thing repeating — showing up again, and then again, when nothing about the situation has visibly improved. A piano can do that better than an orchestra can, because a piano can be plain without being empty.

Listeners who’ve spent time with the heavier end of Piano Reveries will recognize the register. After the Storm opens the album at nearly seven minutes with the same willingness to take its time, and Minor Major sits in an unresolved place long enough for you to feel it. “Working Through It” belongs to that family — the tracks on this record that ask something of you rather than simply soothing you.

Why it makes sense near the end

Sequencing is one of the quietly great pleasures of Piano Reveries, and it’s worth paying attention to where this track lands.

It arrives at number twenty, directly after Joyous — a bright, quick piece that clocks in at under two minutes. That’s a real drop in altitude. You go from one of the album’s most weightless moods straight into its most effortful one, and the contrast does a lot of work. Joy first, then the part where you have to get up the next morning anyway.

Then look at what follows. Track twenty-one is The Sun Will Rise Again, the longest piece on the entire album at eight minutes and forty-two seconds. Track twenty-two is Happy Anniversary, a forty-nine-second closer — barely longer than a breath.

Read those three titles in a row and the shape of the album’s ending becomes clear. Working through it. The sun will rise again. Happy anniversary. Struggle, then hope, then celebration. It’s the most human three-act structure there is, and it’s the reason “Working Through It” doesn’t function as a downbeat moment on the record. It’s the setup. The album’s last stretch only lands the way it does because this track does the difficult part first.

How it leaves the listener

The best thing an instrumental piece about perseverance can do is decline to tell you what you’re persevering through. Words would narrow it. A lyric about a specific hardship is, unavoidably, a lyric about someone else’s hardship.

“Working Through It” stays open, which means it can be about a diagnosis, a deadline, a marriage, a move, a season of grief, or an ordinary Tuesday that just refuses to cooperate. The title points at a shape of experience rather than an event, and the piano fills in the emotional grain while leaving the details to you.

That openness is also why the track works so well as something you actually use. Plenty of Piano Reveries is beautiful background listening — Play in the Grass and Jade’s Lullaby will happily drift past while you work. This one is better as a companion. Put it on when you’re in the middle of something hard and it functions less like decoration and more like company: proof that somebody sat down and wrote five minutes of music about roughly the state you’re in, and didn’t pretend it away.

Hear “Working Through It” on Piano Reveries

The only way to really meet a piece like this is to give it the full five minutes without doing anything else. You can play the previews and buy Piano Reveries right here on the site, either as individual tracks or as the complete 22-track album — and hearing this one in sequence, sitting between “Joyous” and “The Sun Will Rise Again,” is genuinely different from hearing it alone.

If you want to follow the studio and catch new music as it goes out, subscribe on YouTube. If you want to support the work directly and see more of how it gets made, Patreon is the place. And if you’d rather play this music than stream it, Michael’s scores are available through Sheet Music Plus and Sheet Music Direct.

The same instinct — writing music that carries a feeling all the way through instead of resolving it early — shows up in the studio’s game work too. Rebellion, the indie RPG on Steam, needed a score that could hold its mood across long stretches of play rather than tidying up every thirty seconds. You can hear how that turned out in the Rebellion Soundtrack DLC.

And if your own project has a moment that needs music with real staying power — a game, a film, a scene that has to sit inside something difficult without flinching — that’s exactly the kind of cue Michael writes. You can hire him for a custom score on SoundBetter, or just get in touch directly.

Some music tells you the hard part is over. This one keeps you company while it isn’t.

If this resonated, you can listen to and buy Piano Reveries, learn more about the music, or get in touch about a custom score.