Look What I Can Do
I knew I was gay in the first grade. Although it angered me as a teenager, I ultimately accepted my sexuality and learned to cherish it as part of my identity by the time I left high school. But I’m now well into my 30s and I still struggle to accept myself as an artist.
While I never intended to create or release an album, in some ways, I believe I needed to make and share Look What I Can Do to resolve that tension.
I can still remember my dad teaching me to plunk out the theme to ‘Jurassic Park’ on a two-octave Casio. As a child, I took piano lessons until I could teach myself what I wanted to know. But in the end, instruments were just another way for me to get attention as a kid.
I had brokered an understanding with myself that someday I’d have to put down alcohol, too.
When I left for college in Boston, music took more of a front row seat in my life.
I majored in Sound Design at Emerson College, took classes at Berklee College of Music, and started writing songs. I learned to engineer, sample, produce, and mix. I recorded using cheap equipment purchased with tip-jar cash. For years, I would spend my nights shaking cocktails and my days obsessively deciphering the codes of pop music.
But life took its course – and eventually I found myself pursuing more stable and lucrative work. As my white-collar career began, my musical endeavors ended. Among other things, bartending had left me with a taste for excess. In the back of my head, I had brokered an understanding with myself that someday I’d have to put down alcohol, too. In May of 2018, after years of procrastination, I finally put a cork in the bottle.
This is when Look What I Can Do was born.
The first year and a half was rough. Really rough.
I examined everything about my life in high-definition and most of my relationships were put on trial: relationships with my job, my friends, my family, my favorite places, my favorite things, myself. I was asking a lot of questions.
“Why do I live here? Why are these people my friends? Why do I spend 10 hours a day in meetings? Why am I not happy with all the comforts and privileges a man could ask for? Why does everyone ask me about my latest home improvement project instead of how I’m feeling? I’m not well. I’m lonely. I’m afraid. I don’t know who I am and I don’t know what I want. I’ve never had panic attacks in my life and I just had 3 in one month.”
One of the ways I processed the early stages of sobriety was through my piano. It proved a therapeutic exercise to sit and play and write about whatever was on my mind – like a meditation almost – with no intention to record anything. And it was during that first year in 2019, amidst the excruciating clarity and unrelenting questions, that a handful of concepts crystalized.
2020 couldn’t be any worse, I thought…
While the pandemic is hardly the focus of Look What I Can Do, the EP would never have been made if I wasn’t locked in my house with a ton of time to kill.
For most of us, the pandemic was a shock to the spirit. Surrounded by death, uncertainty, and a stillness of time to reflect – I decided that I wasn’t going depart this world without leaving some artifacts behind that were meaningful and important to me.
When I die, my money will be dispersed, my belongings will be donated, my home will be sold. My clothes will rot into the soil from which they came. My data will be erased.
None of these things are truly mine. But these songs are undoubtedly and uniquely me…
For me, the record is like a lithograph…
Recording was finished in December of 2020 and I sent links to my family and a few close friends to commemorate the end of an awful year.
I authored, arranged, performed, programmed, edited, engineered, and mixed all tracks. Look What I Can Do was officially distributed to all streaming platforms on February 12, 2021.
For me, the record is like a lithograph – tracing my passage over dark water with soundwaves etched in stone. When I look at the print, I see my reflection: angry, sad, nostalgic, hopeful, impatient, and imperfect.
It’s a letter to the kid seeking attention, warning him that all the money, success, and excess in the world won’t make him happy. In a lot of ways, I’m still that kid. I’m still a student of music. And I’m still navigating a swamp of difficult, unanswered questions.
But I know one thing: I want to create more before I leave this world for the next.