The show this upcoming Sunday feels important. I booked it six months ago, not knowing at the time that April 7 was the night before a total solar eclipse over Syracuse. I’m used to shows inadvertently lining up with full moons and things like that, but this seems like a different level of on the nose. Literal once-in-a-lifetime cosmic alignment!
Growing up, playing a show at Funk ‘n Waffles was one of the first goals I had. It was a haven for original music in a Syracuse scene that sometimes felt lacking in that area. Plus, it was just a cool place. I used to go play at their open mics all the time in college. I got to play a few gigs there before the pandemic too. All of that, though, was in the era I now refer to as the “Old World.” The world felt different back then. My mindset was different. My capability as a performer and creator was significantly more limited. So was my level of awareness, and the amount of adult life experience to which I’d been exposed. Looking back on those days from the vantage point of having left home and returned so many times now, it honestly feels like a different person. On a certain level, it was. But it’s still me! What a cool thing.
After talking about it with Emma, who’s been the ultimate musical/creative/life collaborator since we met in 2020, we both thought it’d be good to use this opportunity to treat Sunday’s gig as a storyteller night. The past nine years of original music I’ve released have marked milestones of enormous, often tumultuous personal and artistic growth and change, starting with the “demo” Mike and I walked into SubCat Studios to record in the summer of 2015 (which was named “Medium Rare” for being “not quite well done”) all the way through the 2023 cross-country road trip and “You.” So I guess it’s actually eight years of original music. Oops.
In any case, I rarely get the chance to present these songs in chronological order, fill in anecdotes, and let the bigger story tell itself, which is exactly what I’ll get to do this Sunday evening. It’s also something I’ll never get to do again, given that I expect to keep writing songs, and the batch that fills a two-hour set will continue to change as the story continues to unfold. This is a special moment. I like this group of songs. The shape of the story is cool and colorful. Very varied. Very very varied. Hey, this is my website — I can write whatever I want.
I often say that these songs have minds of their own. They choose when they want to be born, and they know how they fit into the story. I’m the one who gets to find out later. “You” feels like the mother of them all.
This show will be as cool for me as it is for you. I hope you come! If you can’t, I plan to try to record it, so you can listen later if it works and I end up releasing it. I hope you watch the eclipse the next day, too. I hope it makes more people notice the incredible world around (and inside) them. What a time to be alive! 🤘✌️👁️🌑☀️