I thought I’d do something a little different with my website. I think of my garage drum studio as my workshop, and I thought it would be more interesting to give you a peek behind the curtain into how I write and record.

The Workshop is where the final tracking for each song begins, usually during late hours and endless electrolyte packets to combat the sweat from the furnace I practice, write and record in. Between the 110-degree heat, phones overheating and calling it quits before I do, a litany of choice curse words from tripping over cables and stands, and late hours shared mostly with Amazon drivers in that eerie quiet when night slowly becomes a new day, it should be the last place I want to spend time. But when I lose myself in a song playing drums, it’s the happiest I’ve ever felt making music.

As the album comes together, I’ll share some of the stories behind the songs. A lot of them are taking accountability for my past, but also the challenges of becoming the person I want to be.

So Long Tucson was nearly shelved for good. I had rewritten it, rearranged it, slowed it down, changed the key, and nothing made it feel alive again. I wasn’t going to force it, but I gave it one more chance.

I sat down to play, and a new part just erupted and became the chorus. That kind of moment feels less like writing than discovery, like catching something while it’s there. You can’t force it. All you can really do is keep giving it opportunities to show up. That feeling is a huge part of why I keep writing.

This was also the first original song I finished and played live after about 13 years away from writing my own music, which makes it feel even more fitting that it almost disappeared before finding its place on the album.

Where So Long Tucson took more than a year to finally feel finished, Not to Be came together in a single night.

I was tracking another song when a phone call interrupted me. I kept strumming while I talked, hit a few chords I liked, recorded them quickly on my phone, then did the same thing a couple more times before going back to the song I was supposed to be working on. I didn’t even know if those three fragments belonged together.

The next time I sat down with them, they did. The momentum was so strong that I stayed up all night writing and tracking the song. The music came quickly. The lyrics took hours, because I’d already been carrying the idea around for weeks and needed to find the right way to say it.

That first night, the song felt sonically complete. But when I came back to it for tracking the album, something was missing. The bridge is where the song shifts from shame and regret into perspective and grace, and it needed its own voice to emerge with it. I wrote and tossed out several parts I genuinely liked. None of them sparked that recognition of, “Ahhhhhhh, there it is.” It’s that feeling of magic and discovery, like the part existed all along and was meant to be there, you just had to give it patience and opportunities to reveal itself. Those moments are why I write, it’s the discovery, and until I feel that for something vital to the song, I can’t call it complete. Then I picked up the banjo, and there it was. The shimmering rolls over the end of the bridge gave me that excitement and closure. Song complete. Story complete.