I sat with a grove of sequoia trees one afternoon and slowly started dissolving. A melody arrived through the branches like it had always been there, waiting to become.
I went to Imagine Festival on Orcas Island in September 2023 with my sweetheart. We didn't know what we were walking into. The island has an atmosphere to it, something ancient and alive in the trees and the water, and the festival magnified that energy.
That's where we met Rafe Pearlman and his wife Amber, and Daniel Berkman. Watching Rafe and Andy Fischer-Price perform, something awakened in me from a deep place. Not a thought. More like a recognition and a calling. I'd been playing guitar most of my life, studied rock, punk, blues, flamenco, Spanish classical, but I'd never written a song. Hearing them play, in the medicine music world that Rafe and Andy move through, I knew I was going to.
I went home and found a guitar teacher. Chris Haugen at Dusty Strings, starting in December. A fellow surfer, around my age. We connected right away. As I began exploring guitar study again for the first time in twenty years, a portal started to open. One night a melody came through, just A minor and G and C. Some words arriving with it, half-formed, like they were waiting for a reason and a carrier.
In January 2024, the reason showed up. I wanted to write a song for my sweetheart for Valentine's Day. So I sat down with my Lowden and worked the melody into lyrics, and Moonlight was born. I'd long carried the moon and its symbolism with me, from chasing its tidal effects on surf to chasing moonlit landscapes in photography. My first song ever. I worked with Chris Haugen on the guitar arrangement and with Rafe on the vocals. It felt special from the beginning. And I felt blessed that I had a team of master musicians around me to tend my process.
After Moonlight, the songs kept coming. Not one at a time but in a flood, as if they'd all been waiting behind that first one. Over the next year I wrote ten more. Some came from deep inner work and men's groups, from years of looking at the layers of conditioning and learning to feel and speak my own truth. Some came from sitting with old trees, from the places where things get quiet enough to hear what's underneath. One emerged during a walk in silence around a mountain lake on Orcas Island with Rafe, where neither of us expected a song to arrive but gave it our full attention when it did.
In November and December 2025, I recorded all eleven songs with Rafe producing. Four are co-creations with Rafe. Two are duets. The music moves between rootsy folk and something more mystical and dreamy. Fingerpicked melodies in different tunings, lyrics that surface from the most honest and unguarded place I can reach.
I believe songs are spells. Our ancestors understood that when we put frequency into space, we shape reality. Every note, every breath, carries the potential to open a heart. In the oldest languages, there was no difference between singing and casting a spell. The words were the same. Getting these songs into the world is not about building an audience. All of it in service to the music and wherever it wants to go. The music is medicine. The spell is taking form.
