This is just a cliff notes version of the past 6 years for those of you who’ve fallen out of touch or wonder what I’ve been up too since leaving the DMV area and dropping out of the music scene.  Just before Covid in the winter of 2019 while I was in India, I was asked by my longtime guru, Amma Sri Karunamayi, to accompany her at all dates on her 2020 US tour performing devotional music. This was the honor of a lifetime and a dream come true.  Around this time I had pretty much burned out on the music festival scene anyhow and was ready for a change, so I sold my house and bought a camper van to be ready to follow around Karunamayi playing music.  And then Covid happened and she was not able to return to the US for the next two years.  

Suddenly the rug was pulled from my dream and I found myself adrift, living in a van, during one of the darkest eras of modern history.  I’m not complaining.  It was a great time to be living in a van instead of being locked down and quarantined, and still trying to hustle a music career while everyone was social distancing and paranoid.  I spent the year of 2020 in the van drifting around out West.  There are always challenges in adapting to a new way of life, especially one so isolated where everywhere you go you are a stranger without the security of a fixed address and refuge.  But I adapted well, truly did enjoy the adventure, and grew a lot during that strange period in America.  

By the Spring of 2021, I had this strong intuition that the economy and housing market might be in for some turmoil, and that if I didn’t move fast, I might get locked out from ever being able to buy a home again.  So I made it my mission that Spring to find and buy a home.  After a year of drifting, I had settled on the Black Hills area of South Dakota as my target location.  I had been visiting the area on road trips since highschool, had some friends in the area, and felt a strong connection to the land.  But I soon found that I couldn’t really afford the type of home or land I was looking for in the Black Hills.  It was a very competitive market.  After spending a few fruitless weeks working with a realtor, I started checking Zillow on my own on the Wyoming side of the border.  It didn’t take me long to find a 40 acre ranchette, with a manufactured home, well, and septic, for a very reasonable price, especially compared to today’s market.  So I jumped on it and spent an anxious month camping in the Bear Lodge section of the Black Hills National Forest and up in the Bighorns, hoping and praying that the deal went through successfully.  It did.

I had prayed all along that God lead me to the place I’m supposed to dwell, and looking back now, I see my prayers were answered and that it was actually my good fortune not being able to find a home on the South Dakota side of the Black Hills Forest for a number of reasons.  But the simplest reason, is that I’m just a better fit in Wyoming.  It’s a noticeably different ethos and way of life than life in the main tourist corridors of the Black Hills and of South Dakota in general.  Even though it’s a way of life that was previously foreign to me, it’s one that resonates with me more deeply than anywhere else I’ve lived.  I could wax on about it, but I’ll just say I find life more pure and no nonsense out here, more connected to the land, and to things that matter most.  I also find the people to have an amazing self-reliant work ethic, and good midwestern, Christian values. And I love the big sky. I used to say about a place as a put down, “Man, they are living 30 years in the past!”  But Sundance does feel like its living 30 years in the past, and compared to the dystopian disgrace of modernity, I now find that to be a wonderful, refreshing, thing.

So what about my music career?  To be honest, I was a bit broken hearted about how I was treated by the music community for standing up and speaking out against the Covid protocals, and other concerning social issues during that tumultuous time.  I admit, my rhetoric can be harsh and my tongue sharp, but I feel I’ve been proven right about nearly everything I was standing for, quite vindicated by the unfolding of modern history.  I had served my community and fanbase with nothing but love and beauty for decades, and now all of a sudden I was a pariah for speaking the truth.  I’m not gonna lie, that pissed me off, made me bitter, and made me lose the will to share my Spirit with those people anymore.  

So I changed my focus to woodworking in hopes of scraping out a living without having to resort to a wage job.  When you’ve been your own boss your entire life and made your living doing what you love, it’s pretty hard to go back to being a grunt wage slave for some corporation.  I was a man without a trade, because music was my trade, but I had lost the will to do it.  Woodworking had always been a love of mine, and I had high hopes it could become my trade, but it didn’t really work.  I think I was good at it, and I made some beautiful stuff.  In fact, I’m so honored that people have tables, countertops, cutting boards, and such that I’ve made in their homes.  That means a lot to me.  But I couldn’t make it profitable.  Maybe I’m just a shitty businessman.  I’m okay with that.  

But we know that time heals all, and living in such a beautiful location as the Black Hills on a quiet ranch surrounded by fuzzy livestock can sure accelerate that healing.  Overtime I’ve come to the realization that music simply is my trade, and there’s no changing that, and it’s just too difficult to change horses in the middle of a stream.  I’ve also fallen in love with music again and have rediscovered a passion for it.  Rediscovering that passion had a lot to do with taking up a new instrument, the chromatic harmonica, and by shifting my focus to different genres of music more refined and representative of my mature self.  

For a whole month during the Fall of 2025 I drifted around the Southwest in my camper.  I woke up at dawn every morning, soaked in the cold Colorado river, did some yoga and chi gung, and then practiced jazz ballads on the guitar and harmonica all morning.  I would spend most my evenings playing music around a campfire as well.  That musical immersion did wonders to rekindle my passion again, and I’ve spent the whole winter till now developing a set of new repetoire, continuing to practice the chromatic harmonica, and getting my promotional materials together to get back out performing.  It took a little longer than I wanted, but you can’t rush greatness!  Right now, as I type, I’m basically at the finish of line of that process of readying myself and my operation to get back to it, and will start booking gigs this week.

Even though I’m just playing jazz and bossanova ballads in a somewhat subdued style for just about any venue that will take me at this point, I honestly have high hopes and expectations about this next phase of my career.  I’m sure it will grow in ways I can’t forsee.  Everything I’ve set my heart to in the past has flourished.  My heart was injured for awhile, perhaps through fault of my own, but its healed now, and is pumping energy into my dreams again.  It’s actually a wonderful thing to be able to start over from scratch, but with the wisdom and experience of a lifetime to guide the journey.  What matters most to me is that I’m playing what I love with a very simple modus operandi: to put simple, organic, natural, human, non-digitized beauty into the world, perhaps somewhat as an act of penance, but also to help counterbalance our increasingly disconnected, disgraceful, and digitized modernity.  If there’s one thing that I learned during my hiatus, it’s that it’s very difficult to live without a dream you believe in as your north star, something to direct your focus towards and pour your energy into with passion.  I have that again.  That’s all I need really, and I’m completely stoked for the journey ahead, with no real attachment to where it leads.  It’s enough to know I’m walking upright again, putting beautiful sounds into the ether, and moving forward along the path of destiny.

And since it is Father’s Day, it is only fair and needful to say that, of course, I would not have had the flexibility and support to go through this process without love and help from my father (and my mom), and I am deeply grateful for that, and humble to that reality.  My parents have always supported my dreams and have provided a safety net for my wildest undertakings.  My gratitude for that is beyond expression and I have no delusions or shame about it.  I am a fortunate one indeed, and I hope to be able to give back to others as has been given to me, through whatever means I can.  Thanks Mom and Dad.  I love you.

Well, I guess that wasn’t exactly “Cliff’s Notes”, but sometimes we just have these moments of sincerity and expression, and I’m not one to stifle such things.

Photos by Craig Olsen