What happens when you’re stuck in the house for months during a global pandemic? Well I don’t know about you, but I defer to creativity.
I had started working on a follow-up to my last album in 2019… It was going to be all about my journey over the prior 2 years, and I had all these ideas and concepts for things I wanted to write about… and it was not going well.
Work was picking up, and I’m not one to beat a dead horse, so I ended up scrapping it. And lowkey, I was seriously considering putting music down for good. There’s only so many years I can just throw out a single just to justify keeping my Distrokid account.
Then the Nashville tornado happened, and I lost power for two days. Two weeks later, we’re forced into quarantine because of COVID-19. A month after that, some weird storm hit Nashville and I lost power again for two days.
At this point, I’m only leaving the house for gas and groceries. I’m blessed to be able to work from home, so I wasn’t affected financially… but the industry was freaking out trying to find new revenue streams because nobody can tour, so my workload increased quite a bit.
So you take a global pandemic, add solitude, a couple natural disasters, and a nice helping of work stress… and you get a nightmare.
The one thing that keeps me sane in the midst of chaos is creativity. For a while, it was creating videos, learning green screen and strengthening my editing skills.
But music has always been my first love, and I can’t ever stray too far away from it. And I’m stuck in the house and can’t go anywhere, so I might as well work on something.
I stumbled across Tierra Wack’s album, where every song was 1 minute long… and I thought that was a cool concept, little bite sized songs.
I was always sticking to the formula of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, and everything coming in between 3 and 4 minutes… so why not do a bunch of short songs that chucked the formula out the window?
Enter Tapas.
These tunes were birthed from the struggles of the quarantine, as well as the emotions from my move from Los Angeles to Nashville. I ignored the rules… and created authentic art.
I’ll eventually make a video walking through the thought process of each song… but for now, enjoy.