For a long time, I’ve thought of the different things I do with music as separate.
There are the songs. There are soundscapes and ambient recordings. There is improvisation. There is old-time music. There are the bands I’ve played in, the records I’ve made, the music I’ve written about, and all the music I’ve spent a lifetime listening to.
For years, I’ve wondered which of these things was really me.
I’m beginning to think that was the wrong question.
Maybe they’re all part of the same thing.
I’ve been trying to become a songwriter for a very long time. In one form or another, I’ve been writing songs for thirty five years. But I didn’t take a straight path toward becoming a songwriter. I wandered.
I followed sound.
I became interested in what happens when you listen closely enough to hear things you normally overlook. I spent years making ambient music and soundscapes, exploring sustained tones, texture, space and the strange places music can take you when it doesn’t have to hurry toward a destination.
I improvised.
Improvisation taught me something different: that music doesn’t always have to be known in advance. Sometimes the most interesting thing you can do is listen, respond and see what happens. You begin with something—a sound, a chord, a feeling, a silence—and follow it.
I played old songs, blues, folk, fiddle tunes. That brought me back to something elemental. A melody, a few chords, a voice, a story. Music that has survived because someone kept singing it.
And all the while, I kept writing my own songs.
For a long time I wondered why I hadn’t simply become the songwriter I imagined I should be.
Now I’m beginning to see that perhaps I was becoming one all along.
The soundscapes taught me to listen.
Improvisation taught me to trust what happens when I don’t know what’s coming next.
Old songs taught me that simplicity can carry enormous weight.
Years of playing music taught me that a song isn’t just an arrangement of notes and words. It’s a way of paying attention to the world.
And all those years of listening—to records, musicians, rooms, landscapes, conversations, silence—have become part of how I hear a song now.
So I’m not interested in choosing between these things anymore.
I don’t want to put the soundscapes in one box, the improvisations in another and the songs in a third.
I want to see what happens when they all become part of the same musical life.
Some songs may be nothing more than a voice and a guitar.
Others may leave more space around themselves. A little noise. An unexpected texture. An improvised guitar part. A sound that doesn’t quite announce itself as music but changes the way the song feels.
I don’t know exactly what these songs will become.
That’s part of the point.
I’ve spent much of my life learning how to make music.
At this stage, I’m more interested in learning how to make my music.
Not music that fits neatly into a category. Not music that proves I belong somewhere. Just music that feels honest to the strange, winding path that brought me here.
Maybe that’s what becoming a songwriter has meant all along.
Not finally arriving at some definition of what a songwriter is supposed to be.
But becoming willing to listen to everything you’ve learned—and then seeing what comes out when you sit down to make something of your own.
This is the work I’m doing now; I’ve made the long journey home… back to myself.
