Hello reader of these words. Over the last week I’ve been making some design and page updates to the website and revisiting a number of older entries where I have made some changes. This will be all about the website with reflections on where it began and how it’s developed so far, along with some goals moving forward.
In the spring of 2025 I was traveling the US, and I began to really try to come up with an alternative means of sharing my music and my creative projects outside of the big social media and streaming platforms. At that point my website followed a pretty standard model for a musician’s webpage — geared towards directing people to my social media and streaming accounts, set up to have a professional landing page to link when booking gigs. I hadn’t actually shared any of my music or video directly; instead I was embedding YouTube videos, Instagram posts, and a Spotify player.
Nostalgic for the days of the early internet, when each website had its own unique identity, function and potential, I began to consider rebuilding the website as a means to share my work directly. I remember the experience of surfing the web before social media, even before google. Where finding a new website felt like a great discovery. I remembered the excitement of the website stumbleupon – where with every refresh a new, interesting website would appear to be explored. This was the first exciting thought for a rebuild, what if I set up a website that would provide a new article on every refresh? Each refresh a song, a video, a photo, a story, etc? Then I started considering the practicality of that. If this is all centered around my world, I would need to create dozens, if not hundreds of articles for this idea to work. And so I started scheming on how to achieve that.
Informed by dozens of interviews conducted for the Songwriting Mind project, I was inspired to start cataloging not only all my songs, but the stories, history, and my thoughts and feelings behind each one. It was during that travel that I began to lay down the groundwork, with a vision of eventually writing articles for each song and building a website with hundreds of entries — covering everything I’ve written and recorded so far, as well as everything to come.
On September 4, 2025 – about 5 months later – I published my first entry: Website – Visions where I expressed my simple intentions with the new website. Now over 9 months later I am revisiting the vision and intent.
If I had to explain to someone simply and casually what the website is, I’d tell them it’s just a place where I can share my thoughts, recordings, and videos without using the big streaming and social media platforms. What it’s grown into is a new medium for me to share my thoughts and the things I make. I feel that it’s still in its infancy and still unfolding — with each article I seem to push out a little further, and the scope seems to keep growing.
So far I’ve been doing a lot of retroactive work, reflecting on songs I’d written over the last years and reflecting on travels. There have only been a few entries written from the present moment or with more recent updates, but there’s a lot of work to capture. I still have this goal of eventually writing articles about a lot of the songs I’ve written, but beyond the songs it’s expanded — I’d like to share stories and experiences from my life, largely because the events in my life are so closely connected to what I create.
I feel that a lot of this work is just for my own records — in a way that I might write a song to reflect on and process events from the past, getting all my thoughts out and publishing them in a coherent way feels like a means to process and let go of something that has no other container besides my own memory.
The more entries I complete, the more I realize this process is similar to songwriting. I set the intention to write an article about one thing, but in pulling that thread I often find myself reflecting on or piecing together history I hadn’t even considered when I set the intention to write in the first place. In this way, this project has been providing me with time to reflect deeply, to piece together and trace back these moments in my creative life — an unintended and welcome practice that I hadn’t pursued outside of conversation and songwriting in this sort of depth and frequency before.
I have always felt conflicted around using traditional modern means of sharing and publishing the things I create, and it has been an extreme demotivator for years now. I don’t want to use Instagram to promote my music. I don’t want to release songs on Spotify. It doesn’t feel right, and it never did. And so, in seeking some kind of alternative, this website became a new medium to explore.
I recognize that this long-form, blog-style writing is essentially out of fashion, and I don’t see too many others doing this type of writing, especially in the context of a songwriter sharing their work. I’m sort of doubtful about the interest and potential for engagement in this kind of pursuit, but I carry on with the consideration that for someone interested in this type of content, it can provide entertainment, insight, food for thought, inspiration and understanding that they wouldn’t find otherwise — if I had just made a post on Instagram with a Spotify link in my bio. I hope that people find inspiration in what I’m doing here. Some songwriting friends have expressed their own interest in pursuing similar writing to reflect on their songs, and I hope that others do pursue alternative approaches to sharing their work and thoughts to meaningful ends.
So far I’ve been doing this in stolen moments, when I have the focus and time — this archive obviously isn’t my main project. I stay quite busy with lots of other activities; I have a very active life, I’m involved with my family and my local music scene, I’m regularly traveling and taking on money gigs, and so my personal creative projects will often take a backseat. Yet in the nine months since I published my first entry, this entry marks the 30th published entry, which feels like an impossible accomplishment to me, and still only covers a fraction of the entries I’ve conceived and wish to write.
I’m interested in sharing the process along the way, because it always surprises me when I look back and I see what my vision was versus how things actually turned out. I very quickly lose track of where an idea began, since it is constantly changing and I’m inside of it the whole time, and it’s only in looking at reflections of notes from the past that I can get the perspective of what I was thinking previously. I’m always interested to see what stuck and how it transformed, what was dropped and forgotten, and what unfolded that I wasn’t anticipating.
That last piece has become a major tenet of existence, of my life and approach to living — that the greatest things come as discoveries that I was not looking for and thinking about. They lie in the unknown, beyond the edges of my imagination.
I began pulling on a thread of a website that would randomly provide an article from my musical and creative world. Instead what I’ve found is a new medium to explore and express. I’m not sure where or how far it will go, but I have some goals and visions. I want to keep writing entries, keep sharing songs and stories. I want to find a way to make the website more fluid, make the entries and pages more interconnected and easier to navigate. I want to implement an audio player, and video player. A photo gallery and a soft version of the random entry generator – exploring more tactile/interesting ways to explore the content of the website. These are just a few ideas and intentions I have moving forward. Thanks for being here, dear reader of these words. Enjoy
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