I don’t think I’ve ever put this timeline together in this way, so I’m going to take this opportunity to do so. I’ve been making original music for 30 years. And if you count the song I wrote with my dad that is featured in Voyage, then I wrote my first song about 37 years ago. That’s crazy! Music was my entry point to performance, starting with my high school band when I was 16. In my 20s, I started a pop punk band and we toured around the country multiple times, which taught me a lot about being on stage and engaging an audience. But it wasn’t until my late 20s, after my band broke up, that I ventured into multimedia performances. Gardening, Not Architecture is the name I gave to my solo project that I started in 2007 with the release of a four-song self-titled EP. Right away, I knew that I wanted the live performance aspect of my music to be experiential, instead of hyper-focused on me as an identity or character on stage. I’d had such a strong identity in my band, but with this new music I was making I really wanted people to connect to the feeling and the meaning in the songs, not be distracted by stories they might make up about me in their minds.

My first G,NA show (2009-2012) involved a clothing rack and a strand of LED lights sandwiched with duct tape between two black shower curtains. I hired two of my friends — a lighting designer and a computer geek — to help me figure out how to sync each individual LED light to the music through my computer. This was 2009 so we didn’t have Ableton or any of the programs artists are using today to do this very easily. For a while, I toured with a giant lighting board that weighed more than any of my other gear! For my shows, I turned off all the lights in the venue and stood in front of my light wall, so all the audience could see was my silhouette. It was very effective in getting people to pay attention! At that time I was only performing at small music venues, so you can imagine how weird it was when the entire room suddenly went dark and a crazy light show started happening on stage! My set was 15 minutes long and I was always the oddball on the bill.

My second G,NA show (2012-2014) was built around four vertical fluorescent lights that I mounted to stands I built using plumbing pipe and pieces of wood. Those things were so heavy and clunky, but they worked! I hired a lighting design company in Nashville to help me figure out how to get Ableton to talk to the lights through MIDI and DMX. That was super fun, since I’m also a computer geek by nature! We were able to get them to sync up to the songs in some really cool ways. For that show, I stood on stage with the four light set up around me in a square, each in a corner facing me. I only got to tour with that set-up once, but I did continue to use those lights on stage in different ways for the next couple of years, as I got a band together in Nashville and started playing local shows.

In 2014 I decided I wanted to make a feature film to accompany my next album, which I was working on and planning to release in 2015. I got introduced to Nashville filmmaker Dycee Wildman, who would end up becoming my main collaborator for G,NA to this day, and who co-wrote the Voyage story with me and directed all the films! Dycee and I put together a creative team of two other directors and a producer, and together we created Fossils, a three-part 44-minute feature film set to eight original songs. The visual album premiered in the summer of 2015, and that planted seeds for using film as part of my live show moving forward. I didn’t figure out how to do this until I was invited to participate in a group art show in Nashville at the end of 2016 where the only rule was artists had to fit their piece into a “pod” of some kind. So I built a floor-to-ceiling cube with dropcloths and an opening on one side, and hired a video artist to project the film inside the cube using video mapping. At the time I was playing with a four-piece band, so I had us all wear white jumpsuits and perform with our backs facing the audience, becoming part of the projection screen. The response was really exciting, and I started thinking of more ways to include projection in my live shows.

I had some pretty major life changes happen in 2017, and I put G,NA shows on pause during this time. I dissolved the band and returned to my roots as a solo artist, focusing more on film. Between 2017-2019 I composed a handful of film scores for film and television, which taught me a whole new way of thinking about songwriting. In late 2017, I wrote and recorded a new G,NA song entitled “Absence of Me” that was very different from my last album and much more cinematic. Dycee directed a music video for it that September, and then I sat on the video for over a year while I continued focusing on music for film.

In early 2019, I felt ready to bring G,NA out of hiding by releasing the single and music video, But I knew I wanted to do something really unique if I was going to reintroduce myself to the Nashville music scene as a solo artist. So, building on the idea of the projections, I conceptualized a compact version of that cube show I played in 2016, using projection and the white jumpsuit but going back to my roots of running everything through a laptop and focusing more on the visuals than my performance. I got together with Dycee and made a four-song live show called “Absence of Me,” featuring my new single and three remixes of old songs from past albums, with projections for each song being thrown on my in a white jumpsuit with a white projection screen behind me. (I brought my old light wall clothing rack out of retirement to make that screen!) The songs and videos were woven together with samples of meditations and dharma talks that had spoken to me over the years, creating one continuous experience with no pauses between songs. The show premiered at a small venue in East Nashville in 2019, and the response I got was overwhelming and totally unexpected. It had struck a nerve and I realized I had found my unique voice.

Flash-forward through a pandemic and an existential crisis and I began working on a larger-scale version of “Absence of Me,” this one telling a story from beginning to end, while pushing myself outside my comfort zone with the performance aspects. I began working on the music for a new album in late 2020 and went into the studio in May of 2021 to record what I had so far, which honestly wasn’t much but at least it was a start. I knew the story of the songs and the show needed to be about this inner journey and battle with the voices in my head that had gotten so much worse in the pandemic, and when I shared this with Dycee she not only related but shared the same vision for the show. So when we sat down to began writing the story of the show in November 2021, everything came together on paper very quickly. We had our first day of filming in February 2022. I finished writing and recording the songs in the spring of 2022, then mixing and mastering the album in the fall while finishing all the filming for the show. We started editing Voyage in November 2022, and then I got invited to be the artist in residence at Coop Gallery in Nashville for the month of January 2023. I used this as a chance to rehearse the nearly-finished show in front of a private audience to get feedback and make the final edits and tweaks. Now, I am focusing on the premiere of Voyage in 2023.

I think it helps to look at my career through mile markers like this because I can see the growth and inspiration that led me from one chapter to the next. However, in telling it this way, I don’t include include important and helpful details like how I paid my bills through all of this, or moves I made from city to city, or mental health struggles I had to work through. There might be the assumption that I’ve had funding all this time (I didn’t), or that I have rich and supportive parents (I don’t), or that I went to school to learn any of this stuff (I did not), or especially that it was easy and linear and I was mentally stable the entire time (holy hell, no way). The truth is, I struggled a lot. I taught myself a lot and learned by making a lot of mistakes. I had learned from the DIY punk scene in my early 20s that if you want to make something happen, you have to just go out and do it. So that’s just what I’ve always done. It’s a bit scrappy, but it’s become more refined over time. In my 30s I learned that taking the pressure off my art to be my sole financial support (i.e. getting a day job) meant that I actually had MORE freedom, time, and energy to bring my ideas to fruition — quite the opposite of what I believed early on.

Something else I learned from the DIY punk ethos, something that didn’t become clear until 10+ years later, was that “do-it-yourself” does not mean do it BY yourself. It actually means do it together, with community. So while I’ve been “solo” and “self-funded” and “independent” for my entire career, the truth is, I’ve had hundreds if not thousands of people help me along the way, people without whom G,NA would absolutely not be where and what it is today. So many friends, collaborators, and other artists who have lent their time and talents to help me bring ideas to life. So many musicians, songwriters, and producers who have helped build and create the G,NA sound. So many supportive fans who have donated thousands upon thousands of dollars to help me make stuff through the years. So many venues and festivals and bookers who have taken a chance on G,NA. It’s so important to me today that I stay humble and remember how I actually got here. It was definitely not by myself.