In early April I went back to Jacksonville to judge a piano competition. For the past eight years I have been drifting further and further away from my musical life/roots and almost every year I have been promising will be the year I come back. But here in 2019 I am finally actually reversing my trajectory. I made a very concerted effort to be available for judging in Jacksonville whenever possible. It keeps me involved and I get to give back a little bit to the organizations and competitions that shaped me in so many ways. 

Afterwards I spent some time with one of my best friends, Chris, who is (not coincidentally) probably the biggest fan of my music. Over the years I have given Chris dozens of CDs of my songs and he told me he had recently digitized all of them onto a hard drive and was having trouble naming the files with the appropriate song titles. So we went over to his computer to listen through a catalogue of my music from yesteryear…everything from fully produced songs to some embarrassingly poor rough drafts, all from the 2000s. 

What a fun and cathartic experience! I haven’t listened to my old music in many years, and I had a lot of trouble identifying the song titles myself. But it was a very fulfilling exercise as I gradually recalled why I had chosen certain titles, and then processed what I had been experiencing, pondering and imagining as I wrote these songs. Listening with your biggest fan is also fun because every single song is their favorite song until the next one (he had creatively named one file “this song is awesome”). But the best part of the night was when my older son wandered in to see what we were doing. He has heard a few songs from my album on occasion, but that was when he was younger and may not have truly understood that this was daddy’s music. So it was really something else when he smiled, danced and repeatedly stated that he liked this song and that song and all of daddy’s music. And when Chris pulled up a grainy live video of me singing one of my songs and Jadon got really excited to see his dad actually performing…that was a moment I would like to capture and recreate over and over forever.  

So yeah…let’s not call it a comeback, just do it. Do it for your best friends. Do it for your kids.