Writing

I offer you a series of expanding temporal cycles

Collaboration is about working with other(s), but it is also about reckoning with the realities of how you are perceived by the people you care about.

I think of music recordings a little bit differently.

There have been hopeless moments in my life. Times when I wanted to give up. Months when I became such a cynical witness to our tolerance of human agony that I became certain our collective problems were impossible to solve.

Over the last decade, the music I make has been inspired by a search for the warmth of community, the patience of familiarity, and the clarity of immediacy. For me, these are the qualities that open up space to experiment and explore while keeping things grounded in connection and communication.

I’ve been daydreaming a lot lately. When I was younger I tried very hard to know what my dreams were, but as I’ve gotten older, my mind is increasingly occupied by day to day tasks. I do know that my largest aspiration is still to succeed as a musician. But a couple weeks back, I suddenly remembered that the…

In 2010, the band I was in started to do its first bouts of consistent touring. There were 12 of us, and we toured in 2 mini vans. We started with weekend runs all over New England and slowly widened our orbit until we were hitting the entire East Coast, Florida to Maine. It was my first experiences with…

One perennial piece of advice that I offer to my students is: Don’t try to get it right. This succinct imperative stems from an idea I began considering thanks to one of my Professors in college, Kenny Werner. He was the first to introduce me to the idea of practicing out of fear.

When I’m on tour, it’s pretty common for someone from the venue or other bands to ask how the tour has been going. Usually there are a handful of great shows, some ok shows, and a few really tough ones. That’s experimental music. Or so I thought. This tour felt different. 

In the days when I told myself anxiety was my secret power, I would let my anxiety run free in exchange for productivity. As a result, I stopped feeling proud of my work because I attributed all of the credit to my anxiety. I was ashamed that I was incapable of achieving anything without the help of my secret…

I moved to New York city 18 years ago, in 2006. That’s about half my life, but I grew up in Chicago. There is no doubt in my mind that Chicago is the reason I am a musician today. Well not Chicago. People in Chicago. Teachers in Chicago.

Infallibility is one of the most useful tools in the masterfully cultivated gardens of power, and acknowledging a mistake is one of the brightest red lines of the ruling elite. Just look at the quantity of daily suffering we inflict to maintain systems that are obviously broken. I want to be ashamed of these systems. I want to be…

Being a musician can be pretty confusing. I spend a decent amount of time thinking about why I want do it. Or to put it another way, I think it’s good to understand what about this life makes me happy. For me, the answer is fairly simple: I like going out into the world and doing something that makes…