When I started writing songs in high school, a friend of mine who was into film-making had the grand idea of pointing his video camera at me, scraping the audio from the resulting file, burning it to a CD, and that was my first “album.” I’m not going to share those songs with you. Lol. But it’s fun to look back and see where this journey has taken me since then. Later in high school, and through college, I spent hours at friends’ houses, using their recording equipment to put some tracks down that I could share with family and friends. Nothing fancy, just vocals and guitar. This resulted in a few song collections that I burned onto cd's and passed around. (I’m also not planning to share those songs here…)

After graduating college, a friend offered to produce an album for me. Much of it was recorded in another friend’s basement, with a studio session to record drums and a session in my parent’s basement to record strings and group vocals. The result of all this was my album Glad, released in 2012, full of songs written through a season of depression and anxiety.

Throughout the production of Glad, and for the next few years, I wrote more songs than I had the time to put a full production behind, so I started a blog and a Soundcloud playlist where I continued to upload “songs I recorded in my room.”

One year after Glad, I mustered up the gumption to cold-email some well-known producers in Nashville to see if they would be interested in producing my next collection of songs. I was INCREDIBLY surprised when I got an email back saying, “Yep, we’re in!” The result was my EP, Deep to Deep, released in 2013. This project is made up of five songs that I wrote for my home church at the eager encouragement of my pastor, songs that we could sing together in response to the ways were learning and growing as a community. These are songs that I continue to be proud of, with a production that is so creative and excellent that I can enjoy them as something no longer my own.

Deep to Deep was not cheap to make. When I pulled the trigger on that project, I was young and married and had some ambitious hopes of “making it big” some day. I had some savings, but I didn’t (yet) have a mortgage or kids. As life would have it, it would be some time before I was able to invest in music production again, and this time it would be slow and steady, in my own basement, watching YouTube videos on how to use EQ plugins, compressors, and reverb, borrowing mics from friends, purchasing some of my own, etc, etc, etc.

In 2022 I released my first-in-a-long-time solo-produced song, Love (1 Corinthians 13). It was invigorating to learn how to get behind the creative process of producing my own original songs. After Love, I continued the slow and steady pace, releasing a few singles over the next few years: One Thing (Psalm 27), Psalm 23 (Shepherd Me), Psalm 63 (Better than Life), and Son of Glory (John 1).

As you will quickly tell, even just from the titles of many of my songs, my song-writing method is largely the process of digesting some theme or passage from Scripture, and finding a way to sing it for myself and for those who might like to join in. Please consider yourself invited to the sing-along.