YONDER BREAKS

Happy New Year! Music for me feels like a snowball that started off pretty small about eight years ago, and has slowly been growing as it rolls down the hill. I think 2022 saw the most "snow collected" so far, which I thought I'd share here. It started off with my family set to move to China for my wife's job, which was eventually squelched by Omicron, resulting in a collapse of the whole situation after six months of working towards it. I released "Two Palm Trees," a single produced by my friend Noel Molenda , which tied into the whole saga in many ways. ( You can read more about that story here. ) Later in the year, I released a music video for the single:   Shortly after that, I was contacted by an agent at the Jackson Agency , who was looking for artists for his new branch, the Wright Music Division . This came through a connection of a connection, and was something I had submitted for quite a while before that, sometime during the pandemic. To be hon...

I've been dreaming of recording a Christmas album since I was in high school, and have been slowly accumulating Christmas originals since about 2003. Fast forward to a year or two ago while I was working as an Online Worship Director for a local church during our livestream (pandemic) season. We had a big Christmas worship video shoot planned for Christmas 2020, but COVID spiked days before the shoot and so we had to cancel the whole thing. Not wanting to have a Christmas Eve livestream without any new Christmas music, I recorded a couple worship songs at home, along with some family songs as The Bickerband . I saved the Logic Pro files for those recordings, thus officially starting at least the scratch tracks to my first Christmas album. Fast forward another year-and-a-half, and my agent Kareen at The Wright Music Division of  The Jackson Agency asked for some Christmas music to pitch for those Hallmark movies we all love so much (really, I do...). So I found myself in July...

I didn't grow up celebrating advent , but after moving to Los Angeles and spending time with folks from different faith traditions than my own, I've learned a lot and even picked up some traditions for our family. However, advent didn't (and still doesn't) really make a lot of sense to me. I'm all for Christmas and love to celebrate the season, but the idea of living in waiting and anticipation for a Savior that came 2,000 years ago seems a little silly. Funny enough, I helped create and curate this Advent playlist from 2020. But today I was driving and listening to K-LOVE  , which is probably the biggest Christmas radio station in the country, and they were speaking about advent and anticipation. (I feel the need to mention that I don't always love the music on K-LOVE, but they've been playing some really great Christmas stuff lately, so I've kept it on. Also, my kids love it.) I started to think about what it would be like to feel that anticipati...

Hey there folks! I got into making merch back in 2019 after releasing my first EP because...well, it's fun! It sometimes feels silly having merchandise as an emerging artists, but I love dreaming up t-shirts and working with artists to make them happen, so here you go. Personally, I wear quite a few Yonder Breaks shirts, and tend to get quite a few compliments on this one, which I call Ellie the Elephant: Pink is Ellie's favorite color, of course. It was designed by my good friend (and skateboard sponsor ) Josh Moreno , who is an excellent designer and illustrator. Well, spurred on by compliments (as we often are), I decided to relaunch the merch store through Represent , as well as include a few designs I never released, or that were only available in limited runs. (Limited runs? No more of that! You can order 1,000 of these shirts if you want! Go ahead, I dare you...) Also, on each page is a link to a video that is related to the product. Everything needs to connect, you know...

I was doing dishes the other day and my daughter Waverly, who is pretty attached to me most of the time (I call her my shadow), was hovering behind. We were having a discussion with Ellie, our oldest daughter, about how sometimes one daughter will get one thing and one get something different, but sometimes the split ends up not being fair. (The situation in question was that I gave Waverly a cookie because she was with me, while Ellie was on the phone with a friend. Since she was beside me, and I wanted a cookie, she got one too.) I tell them all the time that life isn't fair, but that that statement is a double-sided coin: sometimes it's not fair in that you  get the benefit over someone else, as is often the case with living in America. Anyway, that's another blog post... In a sweet moment, Waverly, relishing in her gain, said, "Daddy, can we go on a special trip together, just you and me?"  My heart warmed, I replied, "Sure. Where do you want to go?"...