About

I make music for the quiet end of a long day. My songs skip the anthems in favor of steady warm energy that holds a mood, with grit under melodies under feeling.

I build them slowly, in a small studio in Portland, one layer at a time. The room is half the instrument. A pedal chain here, a synth tone there, until the song sounds like somewhere I’ve already been.

Better The Never was the first time I let my own songs out of the house. The name is a small joke about fatalism: better the Never than the Ever. The cover is a photograph of a piano we found in my wife’s grandmother’s attic after she passed. I don’t know whose room it was, or when. It looked the way those songs felt, so I kept it.

Derivative is the loud part of me. Four of us in a room, pulling a song somewhere none of us would have taken it alone. That’s where I go for energy, and for rock.

The solo work is the private part. Programmed drums, synths, sounds that live better in headphones than in a bar. On thisillusioned every part and every decision was mine. Looking back, I think I was learning to live with my own disillusionment. This dissolution. thisillusioned.