I was first in a studio in 2005 but I was young and lacked experience, but more importantly I lacked commitment and priorities, and because of that my music never went far. Frankly, I had potential but I just wasn't very good yet. It's only been in the last couple of years that I've reignited my passion for it and gotten serious about growing as a musician and recording artist. Now, I'm really clear about my priorities: family first, then wellness, then music. Effort + Time = Growth. So, when I'm not working to bring home half of the bread or doing the #dadlife, you're likely to find me here with an instrument or a laptop in front of me trying to create something.

I think I fell in love with popular music riding in my parent's truck on cross country road trips as a kid, often with National Parks as our destination, listening to classic mix tapes my Dad used to make. Back then it was everything from The Beatles and The Eagles to some Motown, and from old school outlaw country to pop love songs of the 80's and 90's he probably knew my mom would like. Mix tapes as an art form, right? I guess making somebody a playlist is the contemporary of that, but somehow I miss the actual tapes with the handwritten liner notes and the random 1% chance of a cassette deck crit fail that would result in a handful of mag tape spaghetti. As I gradually migrated my own tape collection to CDs and there was that awesome phase where my car still had a tape deck but I could play a portable CD player through it using a kind of a cassette shaped adapter... I digress.

As I grew up I gravitated toward legends like Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers and U2 that became lifelong influences on me and in college it was alternative rock bands like Live and Caroline's Spine. I came back to my dorm room one night freshman year and my roommate was cranking the Pulse live version of David Gilmour's legendary guitar solo on Comfortably Numb. I'd never heard it before and my mind was blown. I don't think I've ever been quite the same since. I kept growing up and fell in love and got married and found myself listening to The Alternate Routes and Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors. And, when I started to think about sharing my own music on social media, I was introduced to a whole fresh new horizon of artists and musical styles on social. I'm living in a personal musical renaissance as a fan. One of my current songwriting heroes is Stephen Wilson Jr.

So, I am first and foremost a massive fan of music, and the music that has accompanied my life has always been autobiographical and carefully curated. I'm kind of a weirdo. Like... this is a rule: you can't play an epic song at just any time. You've got to save it for the right moment, you know? How do you know what the right moment is? I don't know. You've got to feel it? You just know? This is the sort of thing that makes my wife believe I'm completely insane, and she's got a point to be fair. Changing to another song in the car? You can't just hard cut to the next song. No no no. You've got to fade it out a little with the volume knob so it's not so abrupt. Be artful about it, yeah? Yes. I'm well aware there's something wrong with me. Now that my kids are old enough to be starting to want to listen to what their friends listen to in the car though, the universe is taking its revenge on me... it's excruciating. I am still attempting to brainwash them about what good music is, but with only partial success.

My approach to recording has changed completely over the years too. When I recorded the Traveler's Dawn EP in 2005, I did it in a real recording studio but I didn't trust myself to play bass or lead guitar on it, and I've always been $#!% at the drums, so I went into the studio with more experienced friends as session musicians who were in real bands and were legit rockstars to me. I was over the moon that summer. I had the songs we made together mixed and mastered by world class engineers and figured "Alright, making a record is the hardest and most important part, right?" Wrong. Very wrong. My plans for promoting the project essentially amounted to "If you build it they will come," and unsurprisingly "they" didn't - and by they I mean practically anyone. I played some shows with a group of musicians from my area who were kind enough to support me and got almost zilch in return for their efforts, got played on local rock radio a bit which was fun, got beat up in a local music magazine as being like "...one of those generic Steven Seagal movie titles that you end up renting twice because you don’t remember that you’ve already seen it," and eventually went broke and quit.

During the next ten years, I had ample free time, massive opportunity, and even built-by-hand a soundproofed studio in the spare bedroom of the house I was living in for a large chunk of that decade, and yet my creative output amounted to a somewhat self-indulgent seventeen song acoustic album that I may re-release bits and pieces of as b-sides or novelties in the years to come. That was it. I had tried to create all the perfect conditions for creativity but hadn't actually spent much time being creative in that space. I couldn't get out of my own way and actually create something. I did meet my future wife during that decade though, and that completely changed my world, so the decade was far from lost.

Fast forward to 2020 and the pandemic, and I found myself playing a lot of guitar during isolation. I was a Dad and had carved out a decent career around my day job, and I'd also had a revelation: we make these agreements with ourselves, sometimes without even realizing we're doing it, about what we can and cannot do - about what limits us. Like... sometime in grade school, some well-meaning teacher told me that I was probably "more right-brained" and essentially that math might not be my thing. I bought that hook, line, and sinker, and spent the rest of my schooling avoiding math everywhere I could. Now, I look back and realize that's crap. I don't know a ton of people that loved calculus in school, but I know a lot of people who pushed through calc or at least statistics and opened opportunities for themselves because they did. I was a Natural Sciences nerd as a kid (ok, I probably still am), and I totally eliminated those paths as a future for myself all because of this agreement I'd made with myself that I was always going to be terrible at math. So, ok. Maybe I was never destined to be doing advanced math on windows in the Ivy League with grease pens, but if I'd worked harder at it - I'm pretty sure I could have become competent.

I started applying that epiphany to other agreements I realized I had with myself like, "I'll never be a lead guitarist. I just play rhythm," or "I can't make music in my current living situation because I don't have the right space or the right gear," or "I don't have enough time to meet my responsibilities and make music." I resolved to stop focusing on the things that were allegedly preventing me from making the music I wanted to make, and just start trying to make music again. It's in my nature to be a bit of a perfectionist, but I've realized that I can't let that cripple my creativity. My gear, as an example is... NOT fancy, these days. I admit, I have a pretty nice pedal board and I love my vocal mic (an old Rode K2), but my interface is very minimalist and I record a lot of my stuff in a walk-in closet I share with my wife's clothes, occasionally having to deal with the recorded sounds of lawn mowers and passing airplanes during editing. Yet, people... we are living in the golden age of consumer and prosumer recording toys! Plug-ins, MIDI instruments, effects pedals with insane DSP capabilities... Like, let's go! Again, I digress.

So, where do I go from here? I want to keep making and sharing music for the rest of my life, and that means I'm going to have to keep my costs manageable and budgeted. Spending and hoping is not a strategy. I'm going to keep pushing myself creatively, exploring my evolving musical influences, and giving myself the joy and freedom to learn and try new things. And, I'm going to try to release at least one new single every three months for as long as I can. Some are going to be good, and some might crash and burn, but maybe.... just maybe... if I keep working at it and I get a little lucky, maybe someday something that I make might become something special to you - and that would mean the world to me.