Growing up in a music-loving household full of CDs and cassette tapes, I long thought it would be fun to create an album. On July 10th of this year, that long-envisioned album finally went out into the world under the title of Bruised Reeds.

The seeds for the shape the album would take began to be planted ten years ago, when Grant Dicks and I collaborated on a score for the film Deepstill in 2012. That was my first time composing a body of music and making it available to others, an experience so satisfying I’ve been making music as a hobby ever since. With the creation of the tie-in single, “A Song for Deepstill,” that collaboration also marked the first time I wrote and sang my own lyrics, and I soon began to think up more songs. But whereas in the following years I would make a few more acoustic instrumentals with Grant (see The Jabberwocky Years), film scores for student short films at Biola University (The Undergraduate), a short album of settings of George Herbert’s poems (Mend My Rhyme), and a collection of digital instrumentals (RE:), it wouldn’t be until the pandemic year of 2020 that I finally set out to realize the singer-songwriter project in earnest. Most of the work was done in the Spring and Summer of 2021, but it took another year for me to put on the finishing touches.