Nights fly by at the restaurant now that business has picked up — the weeks piling up like dirty laundry. Somewhere beneath the warm and familiar anxiety of managing a restaurant, a dull, relentless heartache simmers, coming to a full-on boil only on days off when I don’t know what to do with myself. Songs pour out every other day it seems. Some worth pursuing, some quickly abandoned and thrown away, and still others which feel too fresh and fragile to evaluate right now. One song in...

Somehow it’s the middle of July. The passage of time is an awful thing to ruminate on for too long. Senator Lindsey Graham died last night (I always confuse him with one Mitch McConnell, another senator seemingly at the edge of his life), and as I went to bed, I was imagining the chaotic scene at the White House and on Capitol Hill, a flurry of communications blasting through the American political ecosystem, the kind of scrambling which takes place after the sudden death of someone with...

Until I spread my wings at seventeen and landed in CO Springs from my small town in Napa with the help of some mentors, my music diet was limited and narrow. Through my teens, I ingested mostly Christian Contemporary Music (CCM), adjacent rock bands like Relient K and Mutemath, and main stream singer/songwriters like John Mayer and Jack Johnson. Sprinkle in some Nirvana, Chili Peppers, Sublime, Modest Mouse, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Coldplay, and The Beatles. I grew up with mainstream...