inspiration move me brightly

thank you to all who came out to friday’s show! it was the first one with a full band since my album release party last june and did not disappoint.

a few folks caught some video—check it out:

me and my friends trevor and edu had a ball. no shows on the horizon just yet—but rest assured you all will be the first to know as soon as we’ve got something on the calendar.

on a different note, I’m excited to shift my emphasis slightly from live shows to recording a new project.

my first album was a whirlwind adventure that took nearly four years to complete—by mid 2021, I had recorded over half of a project before realizing that I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

the songs I’d written were too complex and I didn’t have the instrumentation nor the technical ability to fully realize them. plus, they reflected a time in my life I’d moved past and they didn’t quite resonate with me the same way.

from spring 2018; not one of the songs marked for the album but nonetheless audacious. this was during my “pet sounds” phase.

so I threw out the whole thing except for a song or two and started fully anew. that led to Spring Cleaning, which is just a few months shy of its first birthday.

in the name of the album is reflected the nature of the music it contains—after working so long to arrive at a final product, it was really nice to finally get all the ideas out of my mind and on wax.

the subject of this email comes from the Grateful Dead’s 1977 tour de force ”Terrapin Station”.

the song, which tells a multilayered, self-referential, and pseudo-biblical story about a soldier and sailor each attempting through their own means to woo a lady with a fan, serves primarily as a vehicle for dramatic imagery and gorgeous lyricism. the message is straightforward: we may all be reaching for something that’s just out of reach, but isn’t it worth it for us to try?

and indeed the subject line/lyric itself is an invocation of the muse, a request to be granted the ability to evoke the senses—nothing more, as the storyteller’s job is to reveal rather than to master.

only as a conduit for the divine can we reach levels of true expression, and as such that should be the focus of the storyteller: to represent life accurately in honor of its mysteries.

well, perhaps you can tell where my head is at in writing the songs for this new project. while I don’t expect any of them to wind up as dramatic as “Terrapin Station”, the honesties, ecstasies, and disparities of live drive my music forward and push me to test new artistic limits. in a sense I feel compelled to do so.

it’ll be a little longer before I have anything off the new album to share (although a few of the cuts off the highlight video at the top of this email will be included) so in the meantime here’s a playlist of some of the inspiration that has moved me brightly as of late: