The Nomad Archives

My story is weird. Scratch that. Unique. My catalogue - insofar as I can tell - is one of constant self-discovery. Before you read anything else, you should read Breaking Point. You see, my catalogue is a bit messy because my story is a bit messy. It (and Bad Nomad) are an attempt to bring everything together. After the events of Breaking Point, I was inspired to release everything else I had. I spent most of 2023 doing that: releasing & back-dating material. I could have been more calculated about it. I could have built "releases" around each of them and tried to get some traction. But the fact of the matter is that releasing everything was more of an emotional release than anything else. It was a reaction to being cooped up for 20 years.

I had spent so much of my life being so anxious, so afraid, so othered, so masked, that it was all I knew how to do. And yet, I had lived this huge, miraculously creative and fulfilling inner-existence privately. It felt like a secret identity. I felt like some sort of musical super-hero: by day a polished and professional "Composer" and teacher, by night a singer-songwriter.

And so, when it came to 2023 and I made the decision to release everything. The primary driving force was just that I needed to purge. A cleanse. This rich inner escape and safety I held onto had become a prison, a rope around my neck dragging me down. I knew on a deep level that in order to get to whatever came next for me artistically and professionally, I couldn't continue to hold onto everything anymore.

Thus began my BIG SCARY THING: I was going to release absolutely everything I had with a recording. The good, the bad, the ugly, the cringey, the unpolished, the demos, everything. I decided I was going to do it in chronological order, too. I wanted to release everything in the way that I experienced it. Not organized by genre, quality, or identity. Organized purely by my life experience. If I had enough songs for an album, they became an album. If it made more sense as an EP or single, then I would do those. Once I made this decision, the game was on.

During approximately a six-month span in 2023 from around March to September, I dug through my hard drives, exploring untitled or hidden folders. I listened to hundreds of unlabeled audio files, grouping them into productions when they made sense, leaving them alone when they didn't. Part of my reasoning for doing all this, too, was that I wanted to honor the younger versions of me that would have done this if I had the courage and if the technology had existed when I was younger. I don't believe in "juvenilia". Juvenilia has the pretense of ego and is relative. At the time when I made each thing, it was the best work I had ever done and I was proud of it. How would it be fair to continue filtering myself? After all, ego and vanity were two of the things that contributed to this whole problem. So I didn't want to just duo it for current me, I wanted to do it for all of the younger versions of me that I silenced. After all, regardless of how cringey or rough something was, I was always consistently guided by

Going back through everything, I felt like an archeologist. I rediscovered many things previously lost (literally and figuratively), and what was probably the most surprising feeling I experienced was compassion. With each new thing I uncovered, it gave me a chance to step back in time to who I was when I wrote it. I remembered why I had written each thing I did, what I loved about it, what potential I saw in it, and the best I could do with who I was and what I knew when I did it. It helped me judge myself less and love myself more, and it felt really good to lump things together chronologically. So much of my issue around my creative identity revolved around trying to keep the two lives separate, with the singer-songwriter one hidden.

And yet, grouping things together chronologically, in the way I experienced them and wrote them, was affirming to my experience. It felt affirming to truly acknowledge and support my experience by packaging it in a way in which others could experience it the same way as me. After all, so much of the creative process is essentially learning how to remove barriers; more than anything the barriers in your head. Some of those barriers are intellectual (knowledge), some of them physical (equipment / skill), and some of them emotional (psychological). I had done a lot of deep work in this way regarding my compositional craft, but had never considered how packaging / organizing it would affect the larger artistic meaning. (And why would I - I hadn't ever released anything before!)

So here they are - my catalogue, presented in chronological order. It's deep, weird, and wide. Contained among these albums, eps, and singles comprising 23 years, you'll find polished classical stuff next to rough demos, folk songs next to experimental electronic music, half-developed thoughts, earnest attempts, weird mashups, covers, and everything else in between. Regardless of the quality, it's all there. Raw, earnest.

I've provided additional information along with each album, ep, and single to give more context around what I was thinking and what was going on in my life when I made it. I'll try to be honest about it all, and hopefully it won't get too sad. It's a lot of music; I've lived a lot of life and I've made a lot of stuff. This is my world. My universe. I'm not hiding it anymore. Now the choice is yours, and that choice is:

How far down the Rabbit Hole will you go?