Winner of the 2024 Rocky Mountain Songwriting Contest.

The most meaningful project I have worked on so far, is the new music that I am releasing now. For a long time, I thought I needed to write music that people wanted to hear. But the reality is, in order to truly be an artist, you need to write what you want and need to say. It doesn’t matter if people want to hear it or not, if it’s what’s true to you, you need to say it. It took me a while to realize this, because the music industry conditions you to try to “write for the radio”, and those songs are very formulaic and rarely meaningful. Especially living in Nashville, where you can have your songs critiqued by numerous industry pros, it’s easy to get wrapped up in writing the best radio song, and sacrifice what’s true to you. But honestly, a huge number of songs, successful songs, never make it to the radio, so why should we be so focused on writing for the radio? The other big motivator for me to change my music was the fact that I didn’t feel authentic, which I believe is the key to being an artist. It took me about a year to break some of the conditioning that I fell for here in Nashville, and I still struggle with it at times. My brain says “no that’s not a good enough hook, the word play isn’t creative enough”, even though it’s a hook that is true and authentic to me. My song Boogeyman is my first step in me becoming an authentic artist. I talk about my views, and the way I see life today, because that’s what people look for when they listen to an artist. That song broke the floodgates for me. After Boogeyman I wrote Black Sheep and Hands Up pretty much immediately, because they were ideas that were welling inside of me, waiting to come out, and I had been suppressing them.