When I was 17 (and again when I was 21) I got to travel through the dark underbelly of Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. I played guitar in a jazz big band that was to perform at the Starlight Café. Since Disney needs to maintain uninterrupted spectacle at all costs they have a whole complicated procedure [...]

I woke up this morning in New York City at 2 am, exhausted, at the end of a solo tour. Now I’m on a plane bound for Portland. Tonight I’ve got a show at Holocene with Nick Jaina and These United States. Oh, and right before that I’ll be at the Aladdin Theatre to see [...]

 My day job (8 hours a day, 5 days a week) is to listen to music made by independent artists from all over the world. For a music geek, it’s pretty much the dream job. But you know, every silver lining has a dark cloud. Every gift horse has a mouth. And even dream [...]

I believe that Spring will bless me with an abundance of boundless energy. I believe this year after year. I am always fooled. Here is an incomplete list of my April activities: 1) rehearse and perform Rachel Taylor Brown’s “Half Hours with the Lower Creatures” at her CD release party. 2) perform the same show [...]

 Wanderlust? We’ve been off the road now for a month already, so I’m not quite sure if this entry qualifies as a tour diary. It’s actually more of a lifestyle analysis. With gas prices soon-to-soar, and having scattered quite literally half of my salary on music-making last year (doing taxes was a real epiphany), [...]

The “Chance Romance” tour is drawing to a close. Fun times. We accumulated worldly wealth, glowing press, and fond memories of tooth-ache vicodin, porn lights, and invented enemies.  To read about our misadventures, please check out http://www.localcut.com The moral of all these stories reads thusly: “Our iMix generation is thrusting itself full-tilt into a [...]

  I’m not a fair-weather fan, per se. I always root for the same teams: Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, Bruins, Blazers. But my problem is that I don’t pay a bit of attention to sports unless my teams are doing well, exceptionally well. There are just too many games, too many seasons. You could [...]

I drove everyone in the van absolutely nuts with my iPod playlist called “Good Drivin’ Tunes,” a 200-song collection of dense pop, progressive jazz, pianissimo piano pieces a-la Erik Satie, humorless freak folk, and distressed IDM. A full album of any of these artists would have been OK by my fellow travelers (but albums are [...]

 The late night glaze of Figueroa’s neon lifted our spirits, but only for the briefest of moments. There we were, freeze-framed under fake light. The 24-hour taco cart, the ice-cream sandwich wraps, the sugar high, the sodium flares, half-baked, the case of warm Stella Artois cradled in my arms. And then the 3 am [...]

 God told Noah to build an Ark. A big one. He was going to destroy the earth in a matter of weeks with terrible torrents of ceaseless rain. So the faithful man constructed a boat, crafted at a frenzied pace from the largest trees that could be cut in the nearby forests. It would [...]