What is this?
This website is a place where I can share everything in one place — an archive of my work, past, present and future, where all my projects can live in one space. It’s somewhere I can share my songs, recordings, videos, writing and thoughts directly, without using the big streaming and social media platforms. This project is still unfolding and I’d like to make the website more fluid, to make it easier to navigate between entries, recordings, videos, etc. In the meantime you can access entries from newest to oldest through the home page “ericprincessdragon” or browse by category by clicking Posts at the top of the website.
Who (& where) am I?
I’m Eric. I’m a musician and songwriter. I take photos, make videos, and record and engineer audio. I’m a traveler, a dog mom/cat dad, among other things.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, dividing my time between the California redwoods and the wild sea stacks of the Oregon coast. I tend to move like a pendulum between two modes of being – months on the road, full of exploration and new experience, and extended stretches at home in nature, with family and community, which bring their own inspiration and productivity.
“ericprincessdragon”??
The name came to me years ago when I needed an online handle, with basically zero thought behind it. I thought it was silly, absurd, funny and it stuck. Later I came to interpret a mythology around the name. The name points to a fairytale, in its most cliché elements: a prince, a princess, a dragon. I’ve come to see that the music I make and the words I put out into the world are a kind of fairytale retelling of my actual life experience.
What else?
I’ve made music across many genres — acoustic, folk, electronic, hard rock, metal, and more. After fronting the rock band The Planet Of and playing as an instrumentalist in bands like Tiller of the Moon, Dry Spell, Mondo Mundo, Cockeyed Optimist, Maggie Moon, Milk Juice, and Xinxin between California and Oregon for over a decade, I’ve developed as a self-produced artist with a large body of mostly unreleased work.
I don’t believe songs are ever finished, only recordings — and I don’t believe any one recording is the definitive version of a song. The song is something more abstract, fleeting, intangible. As I go through my life my songs continue to grow and change, and I believe they’ll keep taking other forms. All my recordings are self-produced demos, with lyrics drawn from personal experience and creative exploration. The entries on this site give context to how and why the songs came to be, what they represent, and how they fit into the overall mythology of my existence. Besides this website, the best place to listen to my demos is on SoundCloud.
Podcast?
The Songwriting Mind is a recording project I started in December 2024. I travel to meet songwriters in person and record in-depth conversations about their creative process — how songs get made, where they come from, what they mean. I’ve recorded over 40 interviews so far, and I’ve adapted the project into live settings at venues and festivals.
Press/Booking info?