Beyond the Fire: The Story Behind “Primal Fire”
PERSONAL NOTE | NEW BOOK & SOUNDTRACK JUST RELEASED
After years of writing the book and creating the corresponding soundtrack, Primal Fire, both are finally here. Many have asked where it came from—what compelled it. The answer isn’t simple, but it’s deeply personal. The story you’ll read below, originally printed as the Author’s Note, may tell you more about my heart than any interview could. And, of course, I’d be honored and grateful if today you purchased a copy!
Author’s Note: Beyond the Fire
The story you’ve just read—Primal Fire—isn’t just about music, fame, or a prodigal clawing his way home. It is, at its heart, a Divine Comedy retold in modern form: guitars and pills in place of papal robes and terza rima. But the themes? They are as old as dust, as immediate as breath.
This story was born not only from imagination, but from my own lived experience. I can trace it back to high school, where I watched classmates slowly erase the lines they once swore never to cross. Friday nights carried the intoxication of belonging, but Monday mornings revealed the aftermath—shallow laughter, bravado covering emptiness. Weekend after weekend, I watched good friends blur the lines, belonging coming bottled, joy bought on credit. Somewhere in me questions burned.
And the music of the age narrated it perfectly. The Rolling Stones sneered out the anthem:
“Look at me? Does it matter? I’ve been shattered!”
The line was more than sarcasm—it was prophecy. The soundtrack of my generation announced the same descent we were living. From Elvis to Hendrix, from Morrison to Bonham, the list of shattered idols piled high, proof of what happens when shadow wins the stage.
Because the shadow is not mere imagery. It is character, real and active. It whispers in every backstage hallway, pressing us toward ruin. But so is the light—a presence no less real, always calling, often softly, beckoning us to remember who we are. Primal Fire is written this way on purpose: shadow and light as presences, powers, not ideas. They contend for us, and their outcome is written in our choices.
And rock itself has always carried both currents. Sometimes it mocked, tore down, destroyed. But sometimes it prayed. Sometimes it ached. Sometimes it named what pulpits had forgotten. Roger Daltrey’s cry, “Love… reign o’er me!” was no rebellion—it was a psalm shouted in the only language he had left. Rock was in my blood for this reason: it told the truth of longing, even when it didn’t know the Giver.
So when I wrote Primal Fire, I couldn’t help but hear it in rock. Dante’s songs—from Dance of Desire to Always In It—are more than narrative devices. They are the arc of the human soul, the very soundtrack of our own choices. Lyrics I had scribbled years ago became seeds. With time, and providence, they became an actual album: fifteen tracks, a concept album in the lineage of The Wall and Tommy. But unlike those, Primal Fire insists this: it is not Dante’s story alone. It is ours.
Some will ask about the soundtrack itself, and how it came to be. The truth is that modern tools—including AI—helped bring these songs to life, alongside my own production sensibilities. I understand the hesitation. But think of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings—those epic battle scenes are not diminished by the modeling that made them possible. Virtually every song on the radio today is shaped by technology. As Neil Peart wrote in Spirit of Radio: “It’s really just a question of your honesty.” That’s what I’ve sought here—honesty. The tools are only instruments. What matters is the song.
We live, as C. S. Lewis warned in The Screwtape Letters, in a playground of devils. Only now the tempter’s voice doesn’t growl. It pings. It scrolls. It whispers in curated feeds: “You do you.” “Your truth is enough.” It feels like freedom—until it isn’t. Until freedom itself becomes the snare.
That’s why Dante Johnson’s descent is not fiction. It’s autobiography in fragments. Every one of us has felt the tug of the stage—where applause tempts us to forget who we are. We’ve bartered silence, buried guilt under glitter, traded truth for relevance. We’ve stood at crossroads believing the lie that the Ten Commandments were arbitrary rules meant to restrict. But as Cecil B. DeMille declared with clarity that still burns: we cannot break the Ten Commandments; we can only break ourselves against them.
For all the fascination with Inferno—and it deserves it, holding up a mirror to our own collapse—what captured me most in Dante Alighieri’s Commedia was not hell, but Paradiso. The Empyrean. The light too luminous to describe. The intimacy too intimate to reduce. Not the vague afterlife of cartoons, but the blazing reality we’ve been reaching for in every thrill, every late-night craving, every broken prayer.
And this is where Primal Fire turns. The fire that once burned us can, in Christ, become the very flame that refines us. God could, of course, speak to us as He did Saul—blinding light, booming voice. Sometimes He does. But usually He comes another way: through cracked voices, through stained-glass lives fractured by sin, still radiant with grace. Through a Church wounded and yet chosen. Through flawed instruments like Doc, like Bea, like you, like me.
Because this is not myth in the sense of fantasy. It is myth in the deeper sense: unveiling reality. And reality is this—beneath every urge is an ache for intimacy. Every rebellion is really a cry for communion. Every counterfeit fire is a longing for the flame that does not consume but completes.
This book was never meant to be read and shelved. It is meant to be entered. Felt. Sung. Like a cathedral entered barefoot, or a concert where heaven brushes earth. It is an invitation to move from beckoning to beholding.
You are part of this Divine Comedy. You are not merely audience; you are written into the score. You are invited—not just to survive the Inferno, but to let yourself be refined in purgatorial fire, and then to awaken to the Empyrean. To find the God who waits in the wings—not to shame, but to summon you into a light that never fades. To hear, maybe for the first time, that the flame was never meant to consume you, but to reveal who you really are.
We are not lost songs.
We are unfinished symphonies.
And the stage is set for return.
SOUNDTRACK
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