Hi, y’all! Welcome to this little corner of the internet that I’m (with some trepidation) staking out as mine. I am hoping to use this space to build a little community around the music I’m creating. I thought it might be nice to start by giving you a little background into who I am as a songwriter, and how music has become such an important part of my life.
I was lucky to grow up in a household where I was encouraged to learn about music. I took piano lessons from 1st through 10th grade; I was in choir at church; my Dad started teaching me a little guitar when I was 7. Music was always a refuge for me, whether listening to it or playing it -- it's always been a go-to tool for me in terms of regulating my nervous system, even years before I had the language to explain it that way. When I was a kid, I would sing in the shower, making up all sorts of silly little songs (I stopped when I realized my family could hear me...my shyness got the best of me). The first song I remember really writing, though, was when I was 10. It had consistent lyrics and melody, two verses and a chorus. And I remember it unlocking something for me. I'd always been a storyteller, always loved words and writing, but putting those words to music brought something new to that process. It gave me a greater depth from which I could express myself and my feelings.
In middle and high school I wrote more songs. I figured out how to play guitar and sing at the same time, which gave me more options for writing. I wrote songs for friends, and recorded and burned them onto CDs on the desktop computer I had in my bedroom. Occasionally I wrote with friends. And then I got to college, and got extremely self-conscious about my own writing ability. In hindsight, I can understand that I was experiencing the creative gap Ira Glass refers to, where my taste in music outpaced my ability by a fair distance, and being a lifelong perfectionist and "gifted kid," I struggled with the inability to get the music in my head to come out of my hands and mouth. I gave up on songwriting for a while.
Fast-forward about seven years. In that time, I'd come out as queer, then as trans. I'd met the person who is now my husband, who is a songwriter. We had moved to Chicago, where they had taken songwriting classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music before we had met. And I had just started on testosterone, which was shifting my voice (which had been the number one source of my gender dysphoria) into a lower register. I signed up for a songwriting class at the Old Town School. And when that class was done, I signed up for another, and another...and before I knew it, I was regularly writing songs, and had connected with an incredible community of songwriters. A couple of years later, I started playing out occasionally. My partner and I started going to the Rocky Mountain Song School at Planet Bluegrass in Colorado, where our songwriting community expanded even further.
In September of 2025, I found myself reflecting on the pile of 300+ songs I was sitting on. I had planned, back in 2019, to figure out how to record an album, and then 2020 derailed those plans. In the intervening years, I'd resisted releasing music, because I had this "perfect" vision in my head of what that would look like, and I hadn't had the resources to put into realizing that vision. I finally hit the point where I had to ask myself, "If not now...when?" So I recorded a demo of one of the earliest songs I'd written in an Old Town School class, more than a decade before, got myself set up on Bandcamp and Distrokid, and released it into the world. I realized that releasing songs as demos, rather than thinking of them as needing to be full productions, took some pressure off, and let me have fun with it.
As of the time that I'm writing this (22 September 2026), I've written more than 400 songs since I picked songwriting back up in 2012. I've released 16, and I have plans to keep releasing more. I've released a song a month so far this year, and I'm hoping to at least maintain that pace going forward. I was laid off from my day job back in March of this year, and songwriting has become a foundational coping mechanism as I navigate unemployment and the utterly-devoid-of-dopamine activity that is job hunting. I've been taking more classes and developing more songwriting community here in the Twin Cities over the past year, and I've written nearly 70 songs this year alone (which is far and away the most prolific I've ever been). In the past year in particular, I feel like I've really finally found my singing voice, settling into a range and style that feels as genderless as the rest of me.
I started this Buy Me a Coffee page to help support my continuing songwriting work. Truthfully, I'm going to be writing songs whether people pay to hear them or not. But as someone who has enjoyed supporting my friends in their creative endeavors when I've had the money to do so, I've decided to trust that there are people who would also like to support my creativity financially. I cannot adequately express how much your support means to me, whether that looks like streaming music for free, buying songs on Bandcamp, or supporting me here. I really believe music is best when it's shared, and I'm so happy to be able to share these songs with you. Thank you for coming along with me on this journey!