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I recall sitting on the plush worn couch, beige with scratchy duct tape to keep the filling from spilling out. TV screen, tiny with rabbit ears tilted just so to catch the cartoons. Cool bowl in my hand I slurp milk and the last of the cheerios slides over my tongue, down my throat to meet its end. I remember nights after dinner, dad surfing the channels, amalgamation of bright-lit images and stuttered phrases. Sometimes I would get to have the remote, the slick black plastic slippery in my hand, rubber buttons hard to press where my sister’s rabbit had chewed the tops of them off. The night warm and humid I catch a cane spider lurking on the wall and instinctively jump in my seat. A broom would shoo it away but I’m too lazy so instead I watch warily from the corner of my eye, pretending I’m a chameleon while Pat and Vanna announce the next puzzle. Scent of mango and cotton–

My tortoise ran away yesterday. When I say he ran away, I mean my dad let him out of his fence. Dad likes to let Simon graze in the yard, but got sidetracked and forgot about him until after dark. We spent a good while looking for the 80 lbs African Sulcada with flashlights up and down the property to no avail and eventually decided to give up the search. Then this morning I decided to look underneath the truck parked right next to his area. Low and behold; there he was! He’d hunkered down for the night.

My creative mind instantly formed a metaphor (if you know me you know I never met a phor I didn’t like). In songwriting, I find that often I spend a ton of time searching for the perfect lyric, only to find that the one that works best was close to my initial idea. It’s easy to go down rabbit trails (see what I did there….tortoise…hare..?), opening up rhyming dictionaries and reconstructing every syllable, redefining meanings and setting. But there’s something about going with your gut that usually cuts through all the extra stuff. The best ideas usually are the most intuitive and obvious, and sometimes fighting against that first instinct can lead to unnecessary work. Before I get going too fast down the road of idea-dom I’d do well to remind myself that getting a good line doesn’t always mean getting bent out of shape. Time and time again I’ve found great lyrics are often simple and the ones that at first I was afraid to accept because [insert reason].

One thing that keeps my mind churning for better lyrics constantly is the fact that there are a lot of mediocre (and even terrible) lyrics out there, some written by yours truly. So that being a real concern, it is important to be selective and not settle. The problem for me is that I swing the pendulum too far the other way where nothing is good enough. It’s like the old adage says; half a loaf is better than none. So we keep baking, keep searching, keep mixing metaphors till we have results that we’re (at least halfway) proud of. TLDR; the best ideas will usually land close to home. Just like my tortoise.

The music industry is changing. Has changed. This isn’t surprising, as it was only a matter of time once streaming became a thing that music would be mostly thought of as something that is free (or at most worth a $10 monthly subscription). As artists, though, this presents some weird challenges. The keys to getting heard globally now lie in the playlists one’s music gets on, the marketing you do on social media, the intriguing story you have. It’s gone way past just making music for the sake of making music. If you want to be heard and get paid by people listening to your songs, you’ve got to hang with the new gang.

At the risk of sounding jaded, I miss the days when I used to just write and play music because that’s what I wanted to do. When you didn’t feel like you had to share everything you did with the world. Those were purer times, with no ulterior motives or monetary fishhooks. I do think that there’s still space for that, and that the best music often comes from that honest and pure place. It’s just that as an artist trying to stay relevant, you need to consider the tools and industry practices that have become the norm for music consumption. Playlists and online marketing strategies aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. So you stay in the loop, hoping to maintain a respectable level of listenership (and collect those royalty pennies). To me an artist’s job is to be able to write from that real place regardless of external things going on around.

I do think that at the end of the day, the quality of the song should rule. Unfortunately there’ve been too many instances of good marketing creating buzz for a subpar song (Rebecca Black’s ‘Fiday’ comes to mind). The same can be said for production quality; it’s become popular to put more emphasis on a song’s production, feel, and vibe, than on the structural and lyrical integrity of the song, which to me is sad. I heard a great quote from Phoebe Bridgers the other day. She said “There are a lot of great songs that hide behind shitty production, and a lot of shitty songs that hide behind great production.” I’m all for music that makes you feel a certain way and is produced with state-of-the-art tools, interesting sounds and great melodies. I just don’t agree with relegating the lyrics down to the role of afterthought.

Maybe this whole semi-rant is being brought on by the plateau I’ve seen in my own writing since trying to keep up with the musical Joneses. It can be rewarding in it’s own right to come up with content and share some of your personality with others in innovative ways, but also you have to use a lot of non-creative energy to do things like run your social media, keep an updated website, submit to blogs and playlist curators, keep track of music income and expenses and do interviews and podcasts. I feel like I’m in that place where I’m not quite ready to delegate these more manager-y tasks to someone (plus I’ve got zero money to pay anyone to do it professionally) but am definitely wearing too many hats, and some of ’em don’t fit very well. I guess I’m figuring it all out like every other artist in these strange times. I just want to make sure I keep myself grounded in the fact that I am, after all, a songwriting and performing artist. Everything else is just a necessary evil.

I’ve been chipping away at my next release, going through each song and revising lyrics, arrangements, mixes, etc. Some days it feels like I’m fighting an invisible force, duking it out with my perfectionism & what I call my release anxiety. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to share my art, for fear of it being ridiculed, or worse being met with a “meh”.

I think all artists struggle with this feeling to some degree. Whenever my friends are showing me a new song they are working on or having me listen to their latest mix, there’s always the self-conscious explanation: “it’s not done yet”. It’s a scary thing to show what’s basically an extension of yourself to a group of people who may not give a damn.

It can feel like a curse to hold so tightly to your creative “children”, feeling like your art is full of holes still, an incomplete sham. But the flip side is that without that feeling of anxiety and self-critique we’d all be putting out mediocre garbage (many still do). When I’m in a headspace where I feel like a fraud or like my art isn’t anything special, I try to turn that on it’s head and thank myself and my inner critic for being such a stickler for quality.

As the new music model changes, I’ve decided to release my full length album as two separate EP’s online, spaced about a month apart, then to hopefully put all the songs together on a physical album. Not only does this make more sense from a “bang for the buck” standpoint, but it also allows me to focus on 5 or 6 songs at a time.

The painter Henri Matisse said “Creativity takes courage”, and concur. But I also take comfort in the words of the late great Bob Ross: “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents”.

Coming up as a young wanna-be musician in Hawaii, I had a pipedream about being a rock star. I was convinced that if I could learn a couple common chords, I could play just about anything (at least the radio hits and Christian worship songs that my sheltered ears were hearing at the time). I bought a guitar- nixing to spend the money on a trip to Honolulu with friends because I was SERIOUS about it!- and got to learning my G, Em, C & D chords. It was rough going in the beginning (especially since I was a southpaw learning to play right-handed).

Over the years I’ve spent some time honing in on the craft of musicianship, and while I still consider myself an artist who happens to play a few instruments, I’ve gained confidence as a player. I’ve jammed with musicians of all calibers, from those who needed to stop every chord change and find their fingers to those who are advanced far beyond my musical prowess. And what I’ve seen is that while it’s not the end all be all, knowing music theory can definitely be useful.

I remember being in my first serious band (serious in that we put records out and did an interi-sland tour) LifeinPursuit. It was myself and my two friends, Chase and Carl Kauhane. I played drums and helped write the songs. We were all pretty young and dumb when it came to the music biz, and I was the only one who knew anything about chords, key and theory (and that wasn’t a whole lot). When learning a new cover, if the lead singer Chase didn’t know a chord he would just stay on the previous chord and sing the melody over it. Sometimes it actually worked out pretty well. Other times not so much. Carl and I both sang harmonies. We never really talked about what parts to take or tried changing the harmonies if there was a dissonant note. We just came up with our parts in our heads, and if they sounded good to us, we kept them. It was pure in a way, unrefined. We had confidence despite our lack of knowledge (it helped that Chase and Carl had two of the most naturally gifted musical ears of anybody I’d ever known).

The singer-songwriter community (of which I’m a part) seems to be less well-versed in theory and the left brained side of things. And why should they be? Lyrics are the most important thing in a songwriter’s toolkit (or melody if you write more pop-based music), and you don’t need a lot of theoretic music knowledge for those skills. Gone are the days when you had to be great at composing melodies, rhythm, lyrics, notation, in-depth chord progressions ala the George and Ira Gershwin era.

Another thing is that these days feel trumps all (at least in popular music) and everything is so specialized. The last few songwriting conferences I’ve been to can attest to that. When we’d break into writing sessions, there would be a “writer” (the lyrics and melody), “artist” (singer + helps with melody), “producer” (creates the track + helps with melody and direction) and “supervisor” (helps keep the focus on the feel of what the song is trying to emulate). Of course, these conferences are more geared towards writing for commercial purposes like film and TV, so there’s much more of a focus on the vibe of the song and how it relates to its potential placement (emotional backdrop for a scene in This Is Us, happy-go-lucky high & energy themes for a Coca Cola ad, etc.).

But as a performing artist, I can’t tell you how many times it’s come in handy to know basic concepts like how to change keys and what scale sounds best over a chord change. I’ve been at the other end too many times early in my career, where I was asked to take a solo on uke or guitar and wound up wincing my way through wrong note after wrong note, guessing the whole time. It’s not a good feeling. It’s like running a 5k without any training and having to stop and rest a mile in. So even though my artistic pride sometimes suffers when I focus on the “equations” of music (why does this chord sound good with this other chord? What note can I change in this harmony to get it to sound less dissonant? Etc.) in reality it’s very beneficial in real life situations. And unfortunately, even dream-filled creatives have to live in the real world.

I honestly believe that some people are just more inclined to the technical aspects of music, while others are more “feel” or “heart” players. The more artistic types seem to be less in the mathematical headspace required memorize inversions or refer to the circle of fifths. We just want to write and play music that speaks to us on a visceral level and knowing too much about the process can sometimes seem like a buzzkill. It’s fine and dandy if you have someone (or multiple people aka a band) who can do the other stuff, but as a solo artist sometimes you gotta grit your teeth and do things you don’t like. That’s what separates the successful people from unsuccessful.

One thing I’ve learned is that sometimes, you’ve got to wear multiple hats. During the process of recording my current album, I’ve been in the producer’s chair, the arrangers seat, been my own session musician, and of course written and performed all the songs. I’ve learned the limits of how much I can do that’s out of my natural element before getting burnt out and discouraged. But damn there’s nothing like having to figure things out, having to get a grasp on basic and complex chords, arrangement, even basic recording and engineering. Knowledge isn’t everything in music, but it does help a lot to speak the same language as your peers and be able to translate your ideas into reality.

Everybody has a different experience. I sometimes wish I could just write, sing and rap, that I didn’t have to push my brain to learn stuff that it’s not naturally good at, that I didn’t have to inflate my concentration to the level it takes to sing and play the chords (and simultaneous rhythm and sometimes percussion too), or think about things like inversions and dotted eighths notes that make my head swim. But I’ve come to appreciate the fact that I can see both sides of the musical coin. Sometimes it’s good to pull the curtains back and see what makes things work so that you can improve.

It can be pretty isolating living up in the hills on an island. Sometimes I lose track of time and forget what day it is. I enjoy the solitude, but I it does make connecting with others a little tricky. Thanks to the interwebs, I can still be a part of a community while sitting in my home studio listening to cardinals sing. It’s not quite face to face, but the next best thing.

My recluse life isn’t completely idle; I’ve been chipping away at my first full-length album (10 songs and counting!). I’m trying to do as much of it diy, in my humble home studio, as possible for financial reasons, and because I’m the only one that can completely understand and interpret what’s going on in my quirky Hawaii-Irish brain. I have though gotten some much-needed outside help in the form of my friends Alan (hardware and mixing expertise, excitement) and Brad (mic/gear loan, musical expertise, moral support). 

Below are some pics of my foray through the recording process. It’s been a challenge, and there are some days where I’m at a complete loss on how to get from “a cool idea in my head” to “a dope song”, but it’s been rewarding in its own way, and caused me to really be intentional about each lyric, each part, each drum hit. Cause I’m into details like that. 

With any luck (and some hair-pulling)The new album should be out by Springtime 2020. I’m looking forward to sharing these songs with you! Thanks for being part of my music and life.