With the advent of the Internet, we live in an age of hyper-categorization. You can find a sub-category of a sub-category from a niche of a subset as obscure as an Eskimo tropical resort community. I’ve wrestled with how to describe my music for many years and have never truly decided on a label. I’m not opposed to labeling music, it’s just that I truly have difficulty in doing so for my own sound. You can most easily classify my music as “progressive rock” or “art rock.” I think this fits but, I wish to convey a deeper sense of what my music means to me.
Most important, is the sense of wonder from which my music comes. Curiosity, incredulity, astonishment, amazement, appreciation, acceptance, and gratitude are all concepts that cycle about my mind and materialize in my songs. I am at once inspired by all that is possible in a human existence, while sobered by a world that de-emphasizes this concept of wonder. As I yearn to fulfill my deepest artistic desires, I struggle to exist in a world that most highly values compliance. This is at once the source of my art and cause of my turmoil.
The Eskimo Nebula
This sense of wonder is most profoundly realized at an ideas’ inception. Every one of my musical compositions have a one time come from an inspired moment. In that moment of inception, time seemed to suspend itself. It is a sublime moment of which magic occurs from wonder. It is magic because the emotion felt at that instant is sincere, pure and true. It cannot be forced or contrived. It just Is. I’m not quite sure where it comes from but, I recognize that it is a special gift that must be appreciated. Every time I listen to a recorded version of that inspired moment or perform it live, I can briefly relive that perfect moment (although not as authentically at its’ genesis).
So nowadays, we can go down The Long Tail and call the music “progressive wonder rock”,”art rock of wonder” or maybe “soulful art rock.” But, does it really matter? Maybe? Maybe not. Could a written label ever convey the way music makes you feel or think? That’s what makes music so special. It expresses ideas, concepts and emotions in its own way that can only be experienced and hardly described. So categorize it if you will. I actually appreciate it. But, remember – music is ultimately as abstract as a giant holographic Eskimo doing a futuristic backstroke on the cosmic waves of the universe.
