"Making this record transported me," says Daniel Lanois. "I got to travel to Cuba and Mexico and Jamaica. I got to visit with the ghosts of Erik Satie and Oscar Peterson and Harold Budd. I got to go back in time to my work with Brian Eno and Kate Bush and Emmylou Harris. And I did it all without ever leaving my studio."

Press play on Lanois' captivating new instrumental collection, Player, Piano, and you'll be transported, too. Each song here is a portal, an invitation to lose yourself in the moment and disappear into a world of imagination and memory. Lanois recorded the entire collection himself, capturing a series of gentle, exotic piano performances at his studio in Toronto with the help of co-producer Dangerous Wayne Lorenz, and the results are both intimate and expansive all at once. Melodies unfold slowly with patience and grace; ethereal arrangements drift around them like fog rolling through the mountains. More than just an album, Player, Piano is a gateway into a cinematic sonic universe full of mystery and wonder, a place where the lines between reality and fantasy blur and deep truths and desires reveal themselves in profound and unexpected ways.

"Even though there aren't any words here, there's a vulnerability to these songs," Lanois reflects. "There's no veil, no distance between the music and the very personal, very private place it comes from."

The album is a snapshot of a moment in time, a window into a period of isolation in which music offered escape and connection and possibility. The songs here aren't meant to take you to the same places they took Lanois, but rather to create an environment in which it's possible to travel deep inside of your own subconscious and fully inhabit the world of wonder within. These songs are meant to inspire, to awaken, to illuminate. They're meant to transport.