"What kind of music do you play?"
To me, this question feels like being handed a very heavy weight.
My mind rushes: should I mention the punk band? The slow, sad country songs? The blues rock album I wrote in 2018? The Irish band? The show of 70s love songs in February or the musical last Saturday? The bluegrass session at New Year's? What about the thing I care most about, the songs I write and release under my own name? How do I describe that project? What about open mics and songwriting and...and I have a fulltime job because I'm raising two kids on my own. Does that fit into the answer?
It's my experience that when you don't fit into the script society hands you, you are either incoherent or invisible.
That can wear you out. And it's hard to make a place for music when you're busy trying to justify why you should. So there came a point where the music stopped. And I was miserable.
It was then I stopped trying to justify it, and after a few fits and starts came to a new understanding: making art isn't about making art, it's about creating a space for art to happen.
So this website is a space for the musician I am. It's a place to make my art authentically. It's a place not to answer a question about where my music fits, but to demonstrate that question is irrelevant. I am neither a career musician with no family, nor am I a man who had to abandon all creative endeavors to be a sufficiently devoted solo parent. If I play a lot of music in different genres, I'll post it here. If I write a song or just shake a tambourine for another artist onstage, that can go here too. I don't need to be locked into the Spotify catalog of a single band. It's not selling out to play a bunch of cover songs at a gig.
This is a space built to hold it all: my songs' lyrics and chords, an archived back catalog, the new songs and musical experiences, and a nod to the Bay Area Open Mic calendar, which I've been curating since 1998.
It's here I'm creating a space for my multi-project reality: Lightholder, CaliCeltic, Second Hand Fortune, Love Songs & Whiskey, The Soul Band, open mics, and other projects — each real, each different, none of them the "main thing" it sometimes feels like the world expects me to be doing.
And you, dear reader, are very welcome here.