Last month, I had the pleasure of spending two weeks in Spring Green, WI, as their musician in residence. Those two weeks felt like a gift, time spent making new friends, refreshing some weary bones, and rediscovering the simple joy of being creative.
One of the goals of the residency was to collaborate with other artists in their community…which is a challenge to pull off in the midst of a pandemic.
My friend Dewey at Forty-One Fifteen Studio asked me if I’d send him a video of a song for his Homestyle Recordings series, with artists from all over recording themselves at home during this pandemic. None of my songs seemed right for the moment, so this is a new one.
I’ve long wondered if anything is purely one thing. It seems that each moment is a mixed bag: a joyful celebration dimmed by thoughts of the one who isn’t there to share it with you, grief lessened by another hand intertwined with yours, and so it goes.
Despair, anger, courage, fear, gladness–all pushing and pulling against one another throughout each day. And that feels more evident during this pandemic than any other time I can remember.
Hello, my people. In case you haven’t heard it yet, the 3rd single from And Yet is now out. It’s called “Our Love Is Whatever,” and it’s the last single we’re releasing before the full album comes out on 4/26.
Ground Sounds premiered it, calling it “a deeply touching Americana-style showcase of stunning vocals and personal lyricism.”
If you missed the story behind the song for either of the first two singles, you can find them here (“Better Man”) and here (“Hold My Son”).
Last Friday, the second single from the new album came out. It’s called “Hold My Son,” and it might be my favorite song on the record.
I started writing it the morning of the presidential inauguration back in 2017. I can already hear some of you squirming in your seat, wondering where this is going. I don’t want to get too deep into the political weeds here if I can help it, so I’ll attempt to summarize rather than adding one more rant into the abyss of the internet. Continue reading
It’s been a long time coming, this record. I think I wrote the first song for it back in 2015 or 2016. Planned to record it in 2017, ended up recording it in 2018.
And here we are now, with our calendars/planners/online widgets saying February 2019, and the first single of the record is finally getting to see the light of day.
In the grand scheme of the universe, or even in the mid-sized scheme of pop music in America, that probably won’t raise many ripples. But in the tiny scheme of my own journey, it feels worth celebrating. (Celebrating is, perhaps, a relative term. Tomorrow it looks like watching old Mr. Rogers episodes with my 2-year-old who is stuck at home with some version of pink eye.)
I’ve always had mixed feelings about artists who over-explain their songs, but if you’ll humor me, I’ll share some of the backstory on these new tracks.
“Better Man” is not only the first single, it’s also the first track on the record. And if you’ve listened to any of my stuff before, you’ll notice pretty quickly that we’re not in Kansas anymore, so to speak. There isn’t a single note of acoustic piano on the record, and that space has been filled with rhodes and wurlitzer (i.e. old electric pianos), and layer after layer of analog synths.
As for the lyrics, well, here goes a rambling attempt to unpack this one. Continue reading
Good evening friends. It’s with excitement (and a little bit of terror) that I’m launching the Kickstarter for my upcoming album!
To learn more about these songs, the recording process, and hear a clip of a new song, check out the video below. For more info and to join in this adventure, head to my Kickstarter campaign.
Most days, I’m more comfortable interacting with characters in a book than actual humans. Some people call it introversion. Other people call it being a nerd, I suppose.
Contrary to what you may hear, there are a lot of pros to being an introvert/nerd. But one of the cons is that it can be difficult to make a new friend. So a lot of my friends are books.
But you know what’s even better than being friends with a book? Being friends with a library. And that’s just what happened to me recently.
“…they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing.”
—Eber in George Saunders’s “Tenth of December”
I used to have a pair of blue corduroy pants that didn’t fit right. During the years I owned them, they went from being too tight to be fashionable to being too baggy to be fashionable. Some days during college, if I felt like I was getting overly concerned with how I looked, I would make myself wear those funny pants. Forced humility through a little self-humiliation, I guess. We humans are odd.