Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Right now my life is pretty funny! I’m still in this COVID zone of lacking structure and working from home. But if I were to sum up a composite of what my days often look like:

Wake up between 8:30-9:30
Drive or walk to get decaf coffee and a treat
Ingest my decaf and treat at home in my orange chair and either read, stare off into space, or write. On days where I get up too late, I might have to just roll out of bed to hop on a meeting (I work remotely right now)
Seek to escape the void of surrender to the day by looking at email, social media, or agonizing over my to-do list. I try to avoid this and let mornings be spacious and creative, but it often doesn’t happen.
If I’m working that day, do work on my computer. Maybe go to a coffee shop OR just spend hours alone in my house, wondering why I’m going crazy. If I’m not working formally that day, I probably attend to other administrative tasks or projects that are a bit more free flowing. On a good day, I’ll lose myself in reading, reflection, or a project for hours.
I don’t even know where afternoons go typically to be honest. If it’s a good day, I feel absorbed in something. If not, afternoons feel choppy and sleepy and a slog.
In the early evening, I try to disengage with productivity by going to the park, reading, or taking a walk.
In the evenings I’ll usually hang out with someone or spend time alone reading, making stuff, meditating, journaling, etc.
Go to bed between 10pm and 1am.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

Hmm, I’m honestly not sure how to do this!

But I can say it’s different every time. I think each song starts from a totally different place and has a different type of vector, and that’s what inspires me in the process.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I’m a very solitary creator, for some reason. I think that there’s a deep intimacy to creativity that feels much too vulnerable to share with another person. I think I’m just so familiar with how long it took me to get comfortable opening up to myself creatively, that I don’t take the creative relationship lightly.

There are times when I’ve collaborated with friends and it’s been wonderful. And there are times when it’s felt very funny and awkward. It’s been beautiful to witness the times that that spirit that I previously thought could only exist in my solitude is shared between two people. It’s magical. I just don’t know how to sustain something like that without having my solitary thing as the main thing.

The minute I start making music in front of someone, I often feel silly and self-conscious and no longer in touch with the openness I experience only in fleeting hours at home alone. I think I can experience this openness in collaboration, but it happens in smaller magical, graceful moments. For it to be sustained in something feels like it would require a lot of time and patience for the hidden to feel safe enough to come out.

While I say this, I paradoxically am trying to actively challenge this habit by pursuing some collaboration because I also think it would be inspiring and awesome. So while I’m terrified of it and always think I’ll need to remain a solo act at my core, I also am very interested in what collaboration looks like and how it might mirror my more general patterns around intimacy and relationships that I most likely need to work through.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Music is so many things. I think I have the most “healthy” version of my relationship with music when I can hold it simultaneously as the most important thing that I do and the most unnecessary, useless endeavor ever. As both everything and nothing at once.

There are parts of me that want desperately to be able to sustain myself purely on my art, but I also feel quite convicted that in a capitalistic society, everything that money touches is skewed and distorted in some way. I have a pretty bad track record with burnout with monetized, quantified, or commodified passions, and feel determined not to lose music. Therefore, a certain part of me feels very averse to making music my identity.

I also think all people are equally creative, and that it’s a spiritual plane. I think it’s terrible and disheartening to believe in this notion that only a select few people in society are artists. It’s a burden to those that aren’t artists, and a burden to the artists because this belief makes it seem like we have to earn the rights to that identity. I see identity as a creative person more as something that we all can equally claim, maybe it's just a matter of how much one wants to step into it.

Music also feels like a form of service. I know that it’s not an easy way to make much money in our current landscape, and if you’re in it for the ego you’re sure to crash and burn. When I’ve withstood more trying times when I felt disconnected to my own music or tired of the late night shows, I could always connect to the idea that maybe this is my form of service.

Maybe this is the most natural form of giving that I have—to create space for people to feel deeply and inhabit their voids, by way of me inhabiting my void.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

I think my music is very interested in all of these topics.

I think music creation to me is a way of “living the questions” in these topics, of creating myths that reach a hand out farther than my answers can go. Creating a song out of feelings or thoughts or ideas that feel way too heavy to carry somehow takes on a life of its own and becomes your teacher.

I think that’s the magical alchemy of creating anything—that what is impossible to hold or unanswerable or ethereal in some way can ironically become graspable by surrendering to that void.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

I think art and science can be two sides of the same coin—opposing ways of knowing that can not exist without the other.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
    
Good question! I don’t think there is anything inherently different. I think for some, making their cup of coffee is the artform they feel most expressive in. I think the only reason I’m a musician is because that happens to be the medium that I feel I can express in most naturally. It’s not because of technical skill or any qualifications or experience.

I think that any time we access the spacious parts of our spirits and connect to something greater through the process, that it all comes from the same unity. No matter how mundane. Unfortunately, to my detriment at times, I can’t access that unity in some mundane things. How awesome it would be if I could access it while cooking or doing my taxes.

But at the same time, maybe there is something special about music. I don’t think I have the words for it now, but I think we all have experienced it. Music just unites so many dimensions at once in a way that other mediums can’t.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I don’t know if we can! I think that gets back to the science / music question. Of course there are so many avenues of explaining what is happening in the vibrations and the science of it all. But I think art is about acknowledging these connections from a place beyond language and concepts. A place where objectification and abstraction dissolve and we experience something with no moderator.

I just started reading “I and Thou” by Martin Buber, to which I am not yet equipped to summarize, but it is making me think about the distinction between I/It and I/You relationships. To come so close to something as to witness it is to have to leave behind our concepts and explanations and just be with it as a You instead of an It.

I guess that might be why I think music is so special, because it’s the medium that mysteriously unites so many aspects of life to draw us closest to this face-to-face encounter.