Creativity often gets blurred by distractions, trying to do too much, and chasing perfection. The ideas are sometimes fleeting—like puddles after a rainstorm. Other times they’re filled with the temporary excitement of “new” or “cool”—good enough to keep you motivated for a couple of months.

It’s taken me a while to even come up with the courage to do a project like this. But worse, I knew I wanted to do something on my own—like forever—but just didn’t know what that was.

I tried before. A few times. When I first moved to LA out of recording school, I was working an internship in Hollywood for a sound designer and then later went into audio software engineering. I scored and produced the music and sound for a friend’s theater production a couple of times. Was in odd bands playing bass, sometimes guitar. On-off things. I formed a songwriting partnership where we were prolific, but never got out of the studio. Life kind of happened too, so things fell apart. I continued writing and singing at home and eventually released my first album of instrumental music—just to do something. I was dead scared to publish anything with my singing, to be honest. So, I kind of gave up for a while. A long while. And if I did write—it was complete crap.

I tore everything down, boxed up my gear, sold what I could, and shoved the rest in a closet. Trying to forget.

Drought.

Fast forward several years, and an opportunity came up to compose for some independent westerns that a friend was working on. I jumped all over that. A real project! And I love western films. After updating my composition tools and getting my stuff out of storage, I sent rescores of scenes for films he previously released. Maybe I still “had it” or I was cheap. Either way, I ended up doing three projects of original score—before completely getting burned out on it. It was still someone else’s project, and the puddles dried up quickly.

Recently, I ended up filling in on a worship band, playing guitar, bass, and sometimes singing. I even pulled out the old alto saxophone. Picked up the violin and mandolin, oh, and a mountain dulcimer. Yeah, I was going folk, folks! Overall, this actually gave me the courage to sing live while playing guitar. In front of real people. Oh my!

I’m into a lot of things, but what I ended up realizing each time I dabbled in something—I was just trying to figure out how to bring music back into my life. I wanted to create with purpose—not just poke around in the studio with songs that sit on my hard drive or lines in a notebook that only sing in my head.

So, here we are. Welcome to Pulse of Avalon—where the music finally found its way out of the shadows. I hope you stay a while.

More thoughts on This Sh|t’s Real (Pt. 2)