The early years were everywhere a piano happened to be. I learned to write under pressure because the rooms were never mine for long. Borrowed time, borrowed gear, a deadline that was usually self-imposed and always real.

What got carried forward: the discipline of finishing. A song you don't finish does not teach you anything you can use later.

This is the chapter where I started learning what my own sound actually wanted to be, and the way I learned it was by working with producers who already knew theirs. Adam Sutherland produced Waterfall (2018) and Bad to the Hyde (2019), two singles where someone else held the room and made the decisions about headphone mixes, takes, and when a vocal was finished. Coordinating the right team — a producer with the right instincts for a particular song, a player who hears the part you cannot, an engineer who keeps the room moving — turns out to be a craft of its own, and the same coordination instincts I built across years of communications work translate directly to studio sessions.

What I learned in those rooms is where my own ear sits on the spectrum: what gets built up versus what gets fought for, how a session feels when the person at the desk has been doing it long enough that the air moves differently, and which of my instincts I should trust on the next record I make alone.

Mastering on every release goes to Joe LaPorta at Sterling Sound in New York. Crossroads (2024) was picked up by Hype Machine on release and covered across Tinnitist, DNü, Music for the Misfits, and BKonthescene. Four publications across three countries, all earned through direct outreach.

Crossroads is the song that taught me I could finish a record on my own.