Tag: Independent Artist

On Making Music With My Son: A Note on Legacy

Let’s face it – almost all Halloween music is OLD and OVER PLAYED! I decided to change this!

The Halloween album is coming in October, and I keep coming back to one thing about it: what it means to make music with your child.

My son has been part of my creative world his whole life. He grew up watching me write, hearing music constantly, and seeing that creativity was something you could actually do, not just something that happened to other people. Now he is doing it himself. He brought me songs for the Halloween album and they were good. They were genuinely and legitimately good, and the experience of sitting with him as a fellow songwriter rather than just as his mom was something I was not fully prepared for.

He has natural storytelling instincts and a distinct creative signature. Right now, that means an absolute obsession with skeletons, so you can definitely expect a lot of songs centered around funny, spooky, skeletal antics on this record. He commits to a weird idea without second-guessing it, writing with the boldness of someone who does not yet know he is supposed to have doubts.

Balancing a major collaborative project like this alongside my 2026 creative promises has been such a rewarding challenge. At the start of this year, I committed to two daily and monthly anchors: writing a daily blog post and releasing at least one new piece of music every single month.

Showing up every single day to write and release music consistently has completely transformed how I work. It keeps the creative channels open and eliminates the fear of the blank page. More importantly, it sets a direct example for my son about what real creative discipline looks like in practice.

Creative legacy is not just the music you make. It is the permission you give the people around you. Every time I write a song or post a daily update, I am saying to my son: this is possible, your ideas have value, and the weird idea is always worth following. He believed that. Now he writes Halloween songs about skeletons that are creepy, funny, and completely his own.

October is going to be something truly special.

Follow me on Instagram for Halloween season content! Stream Mixtape Mindset on Spotify!

August 21, 2026
Crisp Fall Air Preview: “When It Gets Crisp”

September is 12 days away. Time to start properly introducing Crisp Fall Air.

The opening track is called “When It Gets Crisp,” and it serves as the thesis statement for the whole album. If you want to understand what the next thirteen songs feel like, this opener tells you in the first thirty seconds.

It is built around the F. Scott Fitzgerald idea that “life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” I fell in love with that quote the moment I found it because it captures something I have felt my whole life but never quite had the words for. Fall is not an ending. Fall is a beginning dressed in gold.

“When It Gets Crisp” arrives like that first morning. Clear, clean, full of possibility. The production is a warm acoustic arrangement with a sense of space and air in the mix that feels like an open window. My voice sits close and present, leading you straight into the season.

Underneath the seasonal imagery, the love thread starts immediately. Fall is always better when there is someone to notice it with you. That thread runs all the way through all fourteen songs on the record.

Bringing an entire fourteen-track album together while keeping up with my 2026 creative promises has been a defining test of discipline. At the start of this year, I committed to two major practices: writing a daily blog post and releasing at least one new piece of music every single month.

At first, balancing constant music production with a daily writing habit felt like a massive mountain to climb. But staying true to these commitments has completely transformed my workflow. Showing up every day builds a steady creative momentum. It keeps the ideas moving fluidly from initial inspiration to finished mix without getting tangled up in perfectionism.

“When It Gets Crisp” is proof of what that steady rhythm can produce. The daily writing keeps my storytelling instincts sharp, while the monthly music commitment forces me to trust my ear and finish what I start.

Follow me on Spotify now. September is almost here. 🍂

August 20, 2026
The Christmas Folklore Album: I’m Already Working on It

November feels far away. It is not far away.

I am already deep in the early development stages of the Christmas Folklore Album, and I want to start talking about it because it deserves its own build-up.

This is the project I have been most quietly excited about all year. It is different from anything else in my catalog. It is not the warm traditional Christmas of My Kind of Christmas, nor is it the celebratory community of Christmas with the Saints. This one goes somewhere older.

It digs into winter folklore, the stories that predate modern Christmas, and the traditions that survived because they were woven so deeply into the season that the season could not exist without them. The Irish and Celtic midwinter threads are a key part of my own heritage and have always called to me when December approaches.

I want to write and produce music that sounds like it could have been written a hundred years ago. Music that carries the cold and firelight quality of a winter without central heating, where gathering together was literal warmth and the songs you sang were the warmth you made.

That is probably the most ambitious sonic goal I have ever set for myself. But showing up for my 2026 creative commitments has completely rewritten what I know I am capable of handling.

At the start of this year, I made a strict promise to myself: write a daily blog post and release at least one piece of music every single month. Balancing a daily writing habit with consistent music production seemed daunting at first. Yet, staying true to these daily and monthly rhythms has kept my creative channels wide open. The discipline of sitting down every single day builds a unique kind of creative stamina. It keeps ideas moving smoothly from initial thought to finished track without getting stuck in perfectionism.

This Christmas Folklore Album is the direct beneficiary of that daily commitment. Because I am constantly creating, I am entering this project with sharper instincts, clearer focus, and the confidence to take bigger sonic risks.

Writing music that feels ancient and cozy is a massive undertaking, but I believe it is possible. More than that, I believe it is going to be unlike anything else you hear this holiday season.

November is coming faster than you think. Sign up for my email list to be first to know details, behind-the-scenes progress, and release dates. Follow me everywhere to stay in the loop!

The Kindle book is out now! Paperback and Hardcover releasing on October 1st.

August 19, 2026
The Daily Blog at Day 232: What Showing Up Every Day Has Taught Me
The Daily Blog At Day 232: What Showing Up Every Day Has Taught Me

Day 232 of the daily blog. Let me say that number out loud for a moment.

When I committed to writing every single day on January 1st—right alongside my promise to release at least one new piece of music every single month in 2026—I genuinely did not know if I’d make it past February. Juggling continuous musical output with a daily publishing habit felt like a massive mountain to climb. But consistency is a muscle, and I wasn’t sure mine was strong enough until I started putting in the reps.

Here is what 232 days of staying true to those commitments has taught me:
- The blank page isn’t the enemy. It just looks like one from the outside. Every single day, something arrives when I show up first, whether that is a new paragraph or the seed of a brand-new track.
- Voice is built through repetition. My writing and my musical ideas in August sound more like me—more relaxed, grounded, and conversational—than they did in January. That shift happened purely through the discipline of daily practice.
- Consistency builds trust. Every time I post a blog or drop a new piece of music, I am sending a clear message: I’m real, I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. That trust is the ultimate foundation for an independent artist.
- Connection trumps perfection. My most-responded-to posts and songs are not always the most meticulously polished. They are the ones that are raw and real. People connect to authenticity.
- Everything feeds everything else. Projects like Mixtape Mindset exist precisely because of this daily practice. Writing every day and keeping to a monthly music release schedule keeps the creative channels wide open and the ideas moving smoothly.
With 133 more days left in the year, I am fully committed to seeing every one of them through.

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August 18, 2026
My Process: How Claude and I Write Songs Together
Since I talk about collaborating with AI pretty openly, I want to give you a real behind-the-scenes look at how it actually works. People often imagine AI creation as pressing a single button and having a finished, polished track handed back to you.

The reality is much more active, hands-on, and—honestly—time-intensive. It is a constant loop of refining, tweaking, and iterating.

1. The Spark: Old Notebooks & Human Emotion

It always starts with me—and usually with years of physical notebooks filled with scribbled lines, half-finished ideas, and memories. I bring the original concept, the emotional core, or a rough first verse.

What I need in the room isn’t an automated replacement for a writer; I need a creative sounding board to help me develop those old ideas and push past my initial clichés.

2. Crafting Lyrical Truth with Claude

That’s where Claude comes in as my songwriting partner. I’ll open a session with a clear prompt or feed in a draft from my notebook, like:

“I’m writing a song about the old Blockbuster ritual. It’s warm, nostalgic, and slightly bittersweet. The chorus needs to feel anthemic. Here’s a rough pre-chorus I drafted…”

From there, we workshop in real time. Claude offers options, and my job is to curate, edit, and steer:
- “Okay fine, kid, get the good backpack” came directly out of this back-and-forth. The line started off too sentimental, so I kept pushing the prompts toward the raw, true moment—that exact second your resistance as a parent completely collapses just looking at your kid’s face.
We iterate line by line, paragraph by paragraph, until every word feels grounded, authentic, and true to my voice.

3. Bringing the Sound to Life with Suno

Once the lyrics are locked, I take them into Suno for music production. This is where the marathon of iteration really begins.

Finding the right arrangement, tempo, vocal timbre, and emotional cadence isn’t a quick upload. It takes endless generations, adjusting genre tags, shifting structure cues, and testing different arrangements to get the track to sound like what I hear in my head.

4. Visuals & Storytelling: Gemini & Canva

A song doesn’t stop at the audio—it needs a visual world to live in.
- Gemini for Image Creation: I use Gemini to build out the visual mood, album concepts, and imagery. Getting the exact right tone, lighting, and feel means writing, rewriting, and tweaking image prompts over and over.
- Canva for Social Media: Once the artwork and imagery are created, I move into Canva to design cover art, promotional graphics, and social content to share the story behind each track.
The Real Work is in the Iteration

If there’s one takeaway, it’s that using these tools doesn’t mean skipping the effort—it means spending so much time changing things, testing variations, discarding what doesn’t work, and polishing what does.

All twelve songs on Mixtape Mindset were built this way: notebooks full of history, a stack of AI tools working together, endless hours of iteration, and a human heart guiding every choice.

Listen Now

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music!
August 17, 2026