YONDER BREAKS

It's no secret the live music scene took a huge hit last year. Festivals and tours were cancelled, as many working musicians struggled to figure out what to do financially, as well as with all their newfound free time. Personally, I had just come off of a year of trying to play one show per month, which might not seem like a lot, but coming from having never played a solo live show until late 2018, it was a growth point for me. After accomplishing my goal, I entered 2020 wanting to focus on recording, while still maintaining some of the performance momentum I felt like I had built over the prior year. Of course all of that came crashing down, but here we are over a year later and the world is opening up more. The Light EP album release show at Maeweather Music (RIP) Through a friend , I was able to book an hour slot at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, CA for a couple weekends this June. It's a really beautiful area with a lot of energy, and a nice way to sort of r

I recently released my first self-produced EP! You may have noticed the heading on this website has been, "words + waves // stories + songs," indicating some combination of written word and song, with a reference to surfing because I love it (and I used to write about it all the time ). In keeping with that theme, I wanted to share the stories and lyrics of each song on this EP. Here is the first one for "Eleanor Means Light." Being a father and a songwriter, there is a certain expectation (even if self-induced) to write songs for your kids. You bring the mind the great ones, like " Isn't She Lovely? ," " Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) ", or one of my favorites, " A Father's First Spring ," by the Avett Brothers. When Ellie was a baby, I had started a song that would eventually become, " Let It Go Lullaby ," but was having some trouble finishing it. Sure enough, before finishing what I thought would be the first song I&

Every once in a while there is a brief window of time when I get to the skatepark and feel like I can do anything. I'm sure most skaters can relate. Maybe you've spent the last several days dreaming up tricks in the off hours of the day, waiting for work to be over or lying in bed, imaging quarter-pipes and handrails in your mind's eye. Whenever life's responsibilities back off enough for you to do something superfluous like hit the skatepark (though to you, it's never superfluous, but life-giving and essential), it's like a cannonball launch. You hit the pavement hard and fast, cruising around, getting your legs back. And man, that feeling...the speed in blasting down a ramp, the sounds of urethane carving the hot concrete, the freedom of flying through the air and then the friendly reminder of our earthly domain beckoning us back down with gravity's pull. In those first few minutes, anything can be accomplished. Pain is irrelevant and failure is an old en

Exciting news -- a modest 3 song EP (so cleverly titled, Three EP) comes out today! This one has been a long time in the making -- some of these songs were written 5+ years ago, and have been recorded as demos, but this current iteration is in its best form yet!   I originally began this EP as a little experimental project to record three songs for three people (my wife and two daughters) using only three instruments on each song. I was going to call it 3x3x3 (which doesn't really make sense mathematically). It was a novel idea, but really the main purpose was just to save money in paying someone to mix the album! I started recording with this intention, but somewhere along the way I realized that instrumentation and arrangement are some of my strengths, so why limit the songs just to save a little cash? Also along the way, I made friends with some talented singer-songwriters that taught me that learning to mix and master is a worthwhile task for someone who wants to make music re

It's a strange time to be alive, isn't it? A volatile election season amidst a pandemic, not to mention continued effects of climate change and racial tensions the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1960s. It is no secret that we are all affected by these things, and all of it seems to polarize people one way or the other. This election season I had the enlightening privilege of living in both liberal and conservative regions at the height of campaigning -- Los Angeles and two cities in The South. My biggest takeaway: so much of what we believe is based on perspective . And our perspectives are dependent on a host of factors, region being just one of them, but an influential one at that. You already know which regions promoted which party, but something I was reminded of through listening to both sides, is that there are usually good reasons people believe what they do. When we forget that simple fact, it becomes a lot easier to villainize whoever believes differentl