ORIGIN STORY

I started recording the album in my living room in Nashville, TN in the winter of 2021.

One morning, with mics all set up on my childhood piano, I sat down to play and my right hand started cascading on the piano. For some reason, this morning, it sounded bittersweet and nostalgic. Like it was taking me somewhere I reluctantly wanted to go. I heard a melody in my head and started to sing… I never loved myself enough to let you in to fight and win… I benefit from others who are stronger than me…

I got my phone and saved it as a voice memo, mumbling my way through the sections that hadn’t really emerged yet. I saved it as “Intro piano work”

It was so simple, but I had never heard anyone do it before. Just descend the C Major scale and not stop. I kept working on it.

Eventually I realized that I was writing about the experience I was having of finally recording this album — bringing my fantasy into reality and that it felt like a death. Self-acceptance. Becoming real. I recorded one final voice memo, because I had the idea that this could be how the album starts. You hear footsteps and then I sit at the piano and just start playing. It would transition from this voice memo to full production and bring you into the album, representing how it all started alone in my room at the piano and then becomes so much bigger. I named this one “Steps and intro piano” and it was just the piano at full speed, no vocal. I would record the vocal later.

My right hand was exhausted, but it was so simple and iconic sounding to me. I kept playing it over and over — the lyrics kept revealing themselves. But they made me feel so exposed that when I went to record it with Gabe and Gideon Klein in Gallatin TN, I deleted the vocal, so they wouldn’t hear them. They helped me build the track around the piano instrumental without hearing the melody or words.

Then for a few years I decided not to include this piece of music. It just felt too real. Too honest. Too raw. Too emotional. Too me. I would start the album with Enjoy My Song… the song that started it all anyway.

But that changed in 2024, when I got a zoom with my brother to finally play him my entire album and get his thoughts. I could only play him the instrumentals (I still hadn’t recorded my vocals), but he kindly listened as I played him everything, starting with Enjoy My Song.

He loved it and was very encouraging, but when it was over I felt like I hadn’t revealed everything. Like I was still holding onto a secret. I played him this song Introducing. It had a rough vocal on it too. And as we listened together I knew that it was how I wanted my album to start. It’s earnest. It’s kind of depressing. It’s not even a real song. But it’s exactly where this album is coming from. This is a surrender. Enjoy My Song is very important to me and to my story, but it needs to be set up.

If Enjoy My Song is Chapter One, then Introducing is running your hands along the spine and worn cover, reading the engraved title in gold foil and seeing the forlorn cover art and wondering what happened in there? It’s the invitation to the story. It hooks and pulls down.

It was only years later, as I was filming The Too Late Concert Special, that I realized that the cascading piano in Introducing is just a re-written Pachelbel's Canon, but in C — The same key as it was performed by my favorite pianist of all time, George Winston — and the first piece I ever learned to play.