Reese Harper Drops New Album ‘A Waltz in the Woods’

Utah-based pianist, composer, and creative entrepreneur Reese Harper returns with A Waltz in the Woods, a deeply personal body of work shaped by upheaval, grief, and gradual emotional reconstruction. Built around intimate piano performance and restrained cinematic textures, the project feels less like a formal debut and more like a document of survival—music that was not designed for an audience at first, but for endurance.

The origins of the record trace back to a period in Harper’s life marked by significant rupture. Following a divorce, a departure from his long-held religious framework, and the liquidation of a software startup he had spent nearly a decade building, he found himself detached from the identities that had structured most of his adulthood. In that unmooring, music resurfaced not as ambition, but as necessity—something to hold onto when everything else had loosened its grip.

Seeking distance from familiar surroundings, Harper retreated to the mountains and began improvising alone at an upright piano in a cabin. Those sessions became the foundation of A Waltz in the Woods, a collection that feels shaped as much by silence as by sound. “At first, it was rocky,” he reflects. “I would sit down and search for sounds that felt good in my hands. Sometimes I would land on a small phrase that broke up the pain for a few seconds. Sometimes it just gave shape to the silence in the room.”

Though Harper has played piano since childhood, his adult years were largely defined by work in financial advisory and technology entrepreneurship. Music remained a private practice during that time—something returned to in the margins of early mornings, late nights, or moments of escape into Utah’s mountainous landscape. With this project, that private language is brought into focus, reframed as a central mode of expression rather than an aside.

Sonically, A Waltz in the Woods moves through a quiet intersection of Americana, gospel-tinged harmony, cinematic minimalism, and the raw immediacy of home-recorded piano improvisation. Recorded across living rooms and mountain spaces using a mix of vintage pianos and subtle analog textures, the compositions privilege emotional clarity over technical perfection.

The result is music that feels unguarded and spacious—built for reflection, long drives, solitude, and the complicated process of coming back to oneself.