Album Story: Music Taught Me Who I Was, Pt. 2

When I got home from that road trip, I knew something had shifted.

But knowing something has shifted and knowing what to do with it are two different things.

The idea of actually making an album felt like a long shot. I was not a recording artist. I had no producer, no budget, no plan. I was a finance guy. A founder. A father in the middle of a divorce. The idea that I might step into the identity of musician — that I might take these raw, private recordings and shape them into something real and shareable — felt like it would be too simplistic, too unworthy of sharing.

And that fear, I realized, was exactly the thing I had to surrender.

Surrender had become a word I was learning to take seriously. Not as passivity. Not as giving up. But as the specific courage it takes to stop forcing life into the shape you think it should have, and instead let it become what it is trying to become.

The piano had already been teaching me this. The best moments in those sessions never came from effort. They came from letting go of effort. From listening instead of controlling.

I decided to apply that same principle to the album itself.

From July through August, I kept recording. Day after day. Eventually I had more than a hundred sessions. Hundreds of ideas. Fragments. Melodies. Small moments of fear, grief, tenderness, hope, and light.

I selected ten.

Not necessarily the ten most polished.

The ten that stayed.

The ten that felt the most honest.

The ten that carried the deepest memory of that season.

---

One day at the cabin stands out.

My kids were with me. People were cleaning up dishes. Food had been made. The family was still trying to function inside a reality none of us had fully accepted yet. We were still trying to show up for the kids — still trying to preserve warmth and structure in the middle of something painful.

I sat down and started playing.

There was a moment in that session when a small musical phrase came through that stopped me. I felt it immediately. It is now part of the B section of track four. I still have the original recording.

It was not technically complicated. It was not something I had labored over.

I allowed it to simply come through me.

And when it did, I felt this wave of encouragement wash over me. Something warm, familiar, and deep. Something I was not manufacturing. Something I was being allowed to experience.

That was the moment I began to understand something about creativity that I had forgotten, or maybe had never fully known.

The best music I could make was not going to come from force.

It was not going to come from proving I was good. It was not going to come from technical control or ambition or some heroic idea of becoming an artist.

It was going to come from surrender.

That word can sound soft until life breaks you open enough to understand how much courage it requires.

---

For most of my life, I had been trying to become someone. Someone successful. Someone responsible. Someone financially secure. Someone spiritually approved. Someone useful. Someone strong.

But the piano was not asking me to become someone.

It was asking me to listen to the part of me that had always been there.

The part underneath the roles.

The part that had not been ruined by loss.

The part that did not need to prove its worth.

That is the part I have been thinking about a lot lately, especially as a father.

My oldest son is twenty. I think often about how disorienting it must be to come of age right now. He grew up with a very concrete map. Mission. Church. Family structure. Clear expectations. Then his parents left the church. Then his parents divorced. Then friend groups changed. Then the world kept accelerating.

Social media. AI. Economic pressure. Hero worship. The feeling that you are supposed to become something significant before you even know who you are.

I do not envy young people trying to build a life inside that much noise.

I have deep empathy for that pressure, but I also recognize it because I lived my own version of it.

I spent too much of my life trying to prove that I had value. Through work. Through money. Through responsibility. Through achievement. Through being seen as good, stable, impressive, or useful.

That path taught me a lot. I am grateful for parts of it. I chose it sincerely at the time, and I do not want to pretend I did not. It was an education.

But I could also see now that status and approval were never going to be the foundation of a peaceful, authentic life.

They can support a life.

They cannot be the source of one.

---

What I want my children to know — and what this album taught me — is that there is a quieter but far stronger foundation available. It is not as loud as ambition. It is not as fleetingly impressive as success. It does not always make sense on a resume.

But it is real.

It is the truth of who you are.

Inside every person, there is some younger, softer, more unharmed part. A part that is tender and pure. A part that still knows how to feel wonder. A part that is not trying to dominate the room, win the argument, build the company, earn the money, prove the point, or survive the future.

For a lot of men, that part gets sterilized early.

We learn to be useful. Tough. Independent. Capable. We learn not to burden people. We learn not to need too much. We learn that strength means containment.

And some of that is good. Strength matters. Self-reliance matters. Discipline matters. Action matters. You cannot sit forever in confusion and call it depth. At some point, you have to choose, move, work, and build.

But if strength cuts you off from tenderness, it eventually turns against you.

That is what I had to learn.

The music reconnected me to the tender part of myself without making me feel weak. It made me feel more human. More honest. More alive.

That is why this album matters to me.

Not because I think it proves I am a musician.

Because it helped me stop needing to prove anything.

---

I am calling this Substack The Musician because I am still getting used to saying that word about myself.

For a long time, I thought being a musician meant being impressive in some recognized way. A performer. A professional. A person with permission.

I do not think that anymore.

A musician is someone who listens for what is true and gives it form.

That is what I am trying to do now.

With music. With writing. With fatherhood. With the rest of my life.

I do not know exactly where this goes. I hope to share the album, the stories behind the songs, the places that shaped them, and what I am still learning about creativity, grief, masculinity, tenderness, and rebuilding a life from the inside out.

But today, I just wanted to begin here:

I thought I had lost almost everything.

Music taught me who I was.

[photography by Meikel Reece]