Blog: There Is Never Regret In Living Your Life Authentically

Hi all,

How are we on the fine (insert time of day that you are reading this here)? Grand I hope!

I genuinely struggled with today’s blog topic. To be honest, I haven’t really been sleeping all that well & where I find myself in my day currently exhaustion has started to creep in & I’m feeling a touch loopy. So, if this blog takes the shape of something akin to a NyQuil induced fever dream, now you know why. Though I desperately hope that it doesn’t.

When I am at a loss for what to put down on this here digital page, I reach out to several different spots. The first is naturally a list of blog ideas that I keep written in a notes app in my phone. Nothing in there felt like it resonated with me. Next, I typically ask Evan. He tends to keep better track of the things I’ve either gushed, ranted, or hyperfixated on throughout the week, & while he had some great ideas that have been added to the aforementioned note in my phone, all of them felt like they required a degree of tact & thoughtful navigation that I simply do not think I have in me today. So here we find ourselves at the third option. This is the option of intuition.

Typically what I do when it comes to an intuitive pick, is I draw a few tarot cards & see if the message they carry triggers anything in my brain. As I’ve said a couple of times on this blog, tarot is not magic, it is not fortune telling, it is simply having an exterior prompt that sends you searching within to find something that either you are aware of & ignoring, or as a message of reaffirming. To be entirely transparent & straight forward, my daily affirmations that I post on my instagram story all come from my tarot draws for the day & how I interpreted them for myself. So I went to the deck.

Lately I’ve been working with a stunning deck I got called the Pacific Northwest Tarot. It uses flora & fauna as the archetypes for the cards & the author/illustrator/curator of the deck, Brendan Marnell, did an masterful job on them. Today I did a three card pull with no other intent in mind other than to come up with a blog idea. I got the 7 of swords (deception, impulsiveness, evasion, dishonesty, thievery), the 9 of swords (nightmares, fear, anxiety, worry, isolation, the things that keep you up at night), & the sun (positivity, warmth, success, fun, hope, clarity, healing, living life authentically & to the fullest).

Now this is just a hodge podge of cards. A stack of three with no assigned meaning other than what is traditionally associated with them. There is no one out there saying “this exact combination of cards means this exact thing,” it’s all up for interpretation. That would also be an impossibility from a task standpoint as there are 78 total cards, each with reversals. Each can only appear once in the sequence of three & if they appear their reversals can not. That leaves 3,651,648 possible combinations of just three cards. So the interpretation is really up to the reader.

So I drew a card of the thief, the card of the nightmare, & the card of warm authenticity. How do I interpret that?

Well at first I was a little lost, I’ll be honest. It helps if I put in place the general draw (the 7), followed by a question about the general draw (what does that allude to? what would solve that? what’s in the way or causing that? etc.), but I didn’t. My third card would typically be the solution to the two or the ‘what am I still missing here’ of it all. With these I simply drew the three & went about pondering them for a couple of minutes. It wasn’t until I was ‘bad’ & wandered over to instagram that the message clicked for me.

I’m sure that most of you are unaware that September is Bisexual Visibility Month, of which is a community that I am a part of. I got some post that was sharing that information, but also was talking about how amazing it is for those who celebrate, visibly, that we are out & about living our lives authentically & boldly. Despite the current political climate in the states or around the world, despite what our friends/families/coworkers/loved ones/employers/communities might thing, despite the stereotypes associated with the label as it being a halfway point, a place holder label, a slutty ‘choice’ of sexuality, or what have you, we are out here living our lives as bi individuals & members of the queer community at large. You see, the 7 is not just stealth, deception, etc., it is also feeling like you have to go it alone or that you can’t trust those around you with something. The 9 is not just sleepless nights & anxiety, it is also being afraid to mess something up, or feeling that you have messed up & the sun, well the sun is what cuts through the clouds of these illusions & allows us to live in its radiance & its warm embrace. My interpretation, between the cards & the post, was that I was being nudged to talk about this during a month of visibility for a community that is being met with erasure across the board.

I know for an ‘introduction’ to this blog that all probably felt rather drawn out & a bit off kilter for the main topic at hand, & such criticisms may be entirely valid. But this is my blog, & I am someone who finds the curious human mind a fascinating kaleidoscope of intersecting webs, paths, & tangents ramming into one another & fractaling off into endless avenues & inspirations. I thought you all might as well. After all, you did come here to read my thoughts & words. I also think the foothills that lead to the mountains contain their own multitudes worth exploring. Alright. Enough of me, time to the topic at hand.

I want to start this off with a story, or rather a sequence of events…which I guess is a story. I came out formally on April 28th, 2018. On that day the only person I came out to was Evan. He & I had been friends for a number of years, as well as roommates (they were roommates, if you know you know). He had come out to me previously & told me that he was in love with me, which I didn’t reciprocate to him (gasp). After a while I had urged him to start going on dates. The first one that he did I found myself a wreck. I was jealous, of which I usually am not, & I was overwhelmed. I went to the gym & ended up cycling faster & farther than I ever had before or since. When he came home from his coffee date, we talked about it & we went off to our separate rooms to end the night. I didn’t sleep that night. Instead I tossed & turned entirely confused & lost until I discovered a post by another fellow Kansas Citian, Janelle Monáe, who had just recently come out as pansexual. In Janelles post she talked about the specifics of pansexuality as well as the difference between it & its often bunched with sexuality, bisexuality. I recognized myself in her posts & the next day I told Evan.

We then spent the next week talking about the logistics of a potential romantic relationship between the two of us. I didn’t know if I would ever admit to being who I am publicly for fear of being maligned by the bigoted country music industry, I didn’t know if it was an avenue I wanted to explore outside of us & a few close knit friends knowing, I didn’t know if I wanted to tell my super conservative parents, I didn’t know if I felt like I could ever be with someone of the same sex long term or romantically. There were so many ‘I don’t know’s’ floating around for days, because I had never allowed myself to face this part or me. Even at the age of 27. We started dating four days later & have been ever since.

It was about another year before I told my parents, it didn’t go well. That same year I came out publicly, deciding it was important to be open & honest about who I am with those who hear the songs I write or the blogs I post. I felt that I couldn’t expect myself to make open & honest art without being open & honest in general. The almost daily 'coming outs’ were hard for a while. People ask who you’re dating & you have that panic in your chest that fights to decide whether to lie or be honest, but it eased over time. With every passing day, week, month, year I look back on my life & I wonder how I never saw the signs. I wonder how I was so readily able to lie to myself for so long, just to save face. Now I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine trying to squeeze back into that restrictive box. The box that told me that I had to be a certain way, behave a certain way, love a certain kind of person, believe in horrifically damaging things. It seems like a prison in hindsight. It’s not a space that fosters growth or thought or creativity. It’s restrictive & abusive, & not any way to live.

Now I think that I get more & more queer by the day. I don’t really care most days what people think about how I present or who I am seen with, because, let’s face it, most people’s limited outlook & their regressive opinions don’t matter. At least not to me when it comes to the topic of me. By happenstance I would say about 80% of the people I am close to are queer in one way or another. In fact, most days it's jarring to be around straight people. I love all of my friends, but man, that 80% are some of the most genuine, authentic human beings I can imagine. They live unapologetically & bold & they inspire me on the daily.

You see, all of this is a very round about way of getting me to the point of this whole post. That even when it sucked, even when I was fighting with my family, or getting cut off by people I thought were in my corner, there’s not a single day that I regret my honesty. Not a one. Because I am unchained. I am allowed to fly & stretch my wings up into the endless sky of possibility. I am no longer tethered to the rules of who I have to be to make other people happy or to fit into their idea of me. Besides, I’d much rather disappoint them than disappoint myself any day of the week. I also know that this is a sentiment that is not wholly & exclusively mine. Ask anyone out there who had to break out of the closet to be who they are if they regret it, they’ll all tell you no. Is it hard & scary & does it require a great feat of courage? Of course, but, my loves, the sun waits on the other side of the nightmare, of the deception. You deserve to live in the sun, to stretch upwards to meet it & bask in its warmth, not to shrink & hide amongst the shadows under the clouds.

I hope wherever you are, whoever you are, that you are choosing to live your life authentically & if you can’t for whatever reason, I hope you’re chasing that life at least. My loves there is so much to this world, to this universe. We are specks on the timeline of known history scratching at the surface of understanding. Dare to not be confined by those who are fine living their lives with no desire for depth & understanding.

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Release: Consequences Of My Honesty

I had “consequences of my honesty” sitting in my notes app for about three or four months before it ever got written. Any time that I felt anything that I thought pertained to the topic I would drop it into the note & close it out until the next time I felt inspired by it. It wasn’t until Evan & I went to a write with Chase Coy that the song ended up flowing out & boy, did it flow out.

We had tried a few separate ideas with Chase but I think that none of us were really feeling & we actually got to the point where we were preparing to pack it up & call it for the day having not really written anything. I remember Evan had gone to the bathroom & Chase pulling up a random track that he’d been working on & something just clicked. I literally had packed up my bag & just happened to scroll by the idea for “consequences” & we were off to the races.

Majority of the first verse was just spewed from what I had written in my notes & I actually think it was almost written in its entirety by the time Evan returned to the room. We talked as we went along about how the idea had come to be & about how I felt around the content we were putting to page. The answer of “swept under the rug” came up which is where we ended up with our lovely chorus. Verse two was a bit of a talk through as we pieced together association. Aside from there being consequences for my honesty, what else did it feel like there had been consequences for? Which is where we landed on clarity. From there the song really built itself; the refrain sat in naturally & within 30 minutes to an hour we had finished the entirety of the song…which I then proceeded to sit on for almost five years.

I remember saying in a TikTok that I made a week or two ago that I felt like COMH (Consequences Of My Honesty) was a bit of a party trick that I would pull out from time to time. That it was this song that I had deep flowing emotions around, that was an ultimate expression of how I felt at the time, that I could never put out. I would bring it out when people were asking me to show them songs I’d written & I did so often so that I could get people to take me seriously as a writer & an artist. Not just one more CIS/Hetero White Guy who had nothing new to say in the country music space. I also felt like putting the song out would be a betrayal to my family, even though, in truth they were who had made me feel the way I did at the time that the song was written.

Now, I’m not here to throw anyone under the bus. I am not here to shame anyone or make myself seem holier than thou in anyway. I want to preface this before we go forward & talk about the story behind the song & its meaning & be completely transparent, open, & honest. I want to acknowledge the struggle, as there was one for a long while, but I also want to acknowledge the growth, because I am immensely grateful for the growth & effort that my parents put in to changing from where we were in June of 2019 to now. I applaud them for their willingness to listen & to have a myriad of hard conversations over the many years that led us here.

In March of 2019 I came out to my parents. I left them each handwritten notes explaining my (bi)sexuality, my taken relationship status to someone of the same gender, & how it was something that has been a part of me all of my life. I was visiting them in Kansas, passing through on my way back to Nashville with my former manager who I was helping move cross country from LA. Having grown up with ADHD & the cognitive processing that goes with that, I knew my parents would be reactionary. I also knew anything I said would fall on deaf ears at a certain point. I also knew myself & knew if I didn’t write down what I wanted to say that I would mess it up, become reactionary, become emotional, & breakdown. So I left them the notes in the morning on their pillows & made our way back to Nashville.

It was a painstakingly anxiety filled day, waiting for their response which I didn’t end up getting until probably 8 or 9 o’clock that evening in the form of a text. My father called me a coward for not telling them in person, even though I knew the fallout & told me my mother had been throwing up ever since reading the note. Additionally they sent an email to my former manager & chastised her for the “mishandling of my brand.” After that I didn’t hear from them for two to three weeks.

I lay all of this out because I think it has deep relevance to the song itself. I again, am not here to judge or punish anyone publicly for their actions or beliefs, as at the end of the day we are all humans who have deep ingrained belief systems that really don’t like it when someone chucks a rock at their hornets nest.

When I finally heard from them it was like nothing had happened. Like everything I’d said, the weeks I’d gone through in silence & in pain, amounted to nothing. It was all just swept under the rug. In psychology we call this “dishonest harmony” & it is something that affects older generations at an alarming rate. It is the notion that it is better to have harmony at any cost, even if it is entirely fabricated or glosses over a conflict. This song was written in that time period where I felt the weight of the dishonest harmony as well as was receiving the consequences of my honesty & clarity.

Again, many hard conversations & years later & we are all at a place that is lightyears beyond any improvement that I could have predicted.

In Feb/March of this year I started working on new music. Initially it was with my typical producer, Joshua Gleave. We were working on a song called “Woebegone.” Josh, who is on the road with Sam Hunt, found himself greatly disillusioned with producing & quit all together sending me a long list of recs whom I listened through & seriously contemplated. It was then that I remembered an old band mate of mine, Jess Grommet, had reached out asking me if I needed any demos done as he was now full time in the production space. I reached out not for a demo, but to see if he was full on producing as I knew he & I had similar taste in music. He sent me over a sample of some of the artists that he’d done projects for & I was blown away!

Jess & I met one rainy afternoon at Frothy Monkey in The Nations. We sat & conversed for almost two hours, catching up on life, music, etc etc. At the point where music was brought up I pitched him a few ideas that I felt I’d be cool working on. He knowingly asked if there was anything that I had written that I felt strongly about & COMH was brought up. I explained the song & the premise & told him frankly that I was nervous to cut the song as I knew it would require yet another hard conversation with my parents, but we agreed that it would be the song we would do & set a date to meet up again at his studio.

I kid you not when I tell you I waited until the night before our session to have that conversation with my parents. When I did, I told them exactly what the song pertained to, when it was written, why it was written, & why I felt it was important to put out, even if I knew that it would make them uncomfortable or that they simply would not like what I had to say. They were surprisingly cool with it.

Jess & I started tracking & over the span of 3-4 sessions had the song entirely pieced together, also adding in drums from Alec Parrish. We pulled inspiration from everywhere: The 1975, Taylor Swift, Brothers Osborne, Usher, & even Avatar: The Last Airbender. In addition to all of my precious releases! After we had it to a place that felt good we did two in person mix sessions & sent it off to Sterling Sound to be mastered by Adam Grover. The song was distributed by TooLost with PR by Trend PR & photo assets by Evan, & I am beyond proud of it!

Even leading up to the two or so days after the song came out I was anxious about its release. It was an incredibly vulnerable part of me that I had just shoved out into the world for feedback on. Additionally, my parents hadn’t heard the song, at their request, until after it had come out to the public. They apparently really like it. If I’m being honest, I’m over the moon with how COMH turned out. I think it has turned over a new leaf for me & allowed the walls that surrounded my creativity to come cascading down. For so long I was so afraid to say the wrong thing, to hurt someone close to me even though it was how I felt, & putting this out into the world has given me the permission to be authentic & open 100% in my music & writing. Even if the song is a “flop” I am beyond grateful for all that it has shown me & the freedom it has given me! I’m naturally also grateful to all of you out there who are streaming it & sharing it! It means the world!

Consequences Of My Honesty is available anywhere you listen to music! The acoustic version, that I self produced, will be out in just two weeks & you can pre-save it below! If you’re reading this after the 19th of July 2024 it’s already out & you can just stream it too!!!!

I am so beyond grateful for your continued support & for the love you’ve shown me & this song!!!

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Blog: Censoring Myself As An Artist

I think I’ve reached a point as a songwriter where I’m actively censoring myself. It’s not something I intended to do or wanted to happen but alas, that is where I find myself. I don’t think that I was always this way nor do I think a lot of the songs of my past are vague on the details of my personal life but I’ve had events happen in my life where people I’m close to have hurt me deeply & I find myself incapable of putting pen to paper or note to track out of a fear of hurting their feelings.

This is a problem I developed a couple of years ago that I am waking up to. You see, there are times where those in your life who support & cheer you on do the most undeniable damage they can to you & all you feel like you can do is march on & hope that time heals the wound & it doesn’t happen again. A lot of times these people don’t even know that the'y’ve caused you pain or that the things they’ve said or left unsaid made it to your eyes or ears & dug a sharp gash in your heart. I had one of these & while I wrote several songs around the events in question I began to self limit because I felt they were songs I could never share or release because they would upset the people they are about. Here in lies the paradox for me.

The thing that sucks is that I know these are songs that need to see the light of day because the struggles that I went through are not unique to my person & in releasing them to a broader audience they stand a chance of helping someone else out there who is struggling. I also understand that I am doing myself a disservice by locking these songs behind the screen of my iPhone or the hard drive of my computer & that the greatest art often comes from the greatest pain. In all honesty I’m looking at myself going “wtf am I doing,” as I write all of this into a blog even though I’m not specifying anything.

But here’s the problem. Art is expression. It’s meant to evoke an emotion from the listener, viewer, taster, etc. & by cutting myself off from the art that hurts, the art within me that is real, I am censoring myself as an artist & producing blunted content that helps no one & limits my growth both as a human being & as an artist. In shying away into what is safe like a chastised dog I have placed a wall between myself & the true art that lies in wait within me & I’m not sure I know how to tear it down.

The easy answer to that, naturally, is share & release the songs, but they are songs that require difficult conversations & may cause further damage to a wound that has found some form of healing, even if It’s not how I would like. But what must be done to the bone that has been set improperly & healed crooked? It must be unmade to heal properly. It is a redemption that my heart yearns for but that I fear is nothing more than a fantasy, so I sit stuck in indecision & with a great filter hindering my art.

This is true for those of you reading this who may not be artists as well. I think that we often times allow our ache to be swept under the rug so that we can continue to have certain relationships where we feel the connection outweighs our suffering. It’s a hard road to tread & a hard decision to make, especially if the wound is old. But I feel that we limit ourselves entirely by doing so, not just in the artistic sense but in our development as human beings. It’s often said that you can tell when someone experienced unresolved trauma because they often stagnate in their personal growth. People harmed at 25 remain the same mentally emotionally as they move into their 30s because they would rather cover the wound than face it.

I know I am not alone in this &, if this resonates with you, I hope you know that you are not alone. Your reservations are just as valid as your pain but can you imagine just how joyous it will feel the day that pain is set free, the day the conflict that has been eating you up inside is resolved? Maybe it is worth it, maybe it’s not, but in the end, that’s up to you to decide, just as it is for me. I want so badly to lean into the freedom but I’d be lying if I said fear wasn’t holding me back. As my friend Stephen Lovegrove says, “the path that scares you the most is usually the correct one.” Maybe it’s time to take the scary path & step out of the pain that has become comfortable. Maybe it’s time to step on a few toes.

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Blog: Stop Pressing Mute

Do you ever find yourself minimizing yourself, omitting parts of your personality or who you really are as a person just to make the other people around you feel more comfortable? Do you often do so even when you have no idea how that other person will reach? It’s sometimes like you have this whole preconceived narrative in your head about how they won’t want to be around you any longer or you feel like they won’t love you anymore because it doesn’t fit into their ideal of who you are as a person. You’re not alone if you do, I think to some extend we all do this, we all mute parts of ourselves, situationally, in an attempt to fit in.

I mean, why shouldn’t we? We evolved from hunter/gatherers, a society where being outcast could mean life or death. We depended upon the tribe or the collective for shelter, food, water, & other resources, so of course that mentality has been drilled into our brains. From there we cultivated farmland, becoming agriculturally bound & even then if you didn’t present properly to the ruling faction or the person in charge of getting your food, granted you weren’t farming it yourself, you would starve. These social constructs continued on & on & on perpetuated by class, religion, tradition, & other miscellaneous societal contracts that we’re all expected to adhere to, even if some of those contracts have long since expired.

We are now living in the 21st century, never have we ever been, as a global community, more connected. I know a lot of you would argue a dissonance because of technology & while I definitely think it’s a double edged sword, it has never been easier for us as human beings to find communities where we belong. There are people out there who believe the same things, feel the same way, geek out over the same material or hobbies as us & yet still we mute ourselves.

I am beyond guilty of this, it’s something I still fight to break on the daily because there is an expectation when you grow up a middle-class midwest American white boy in a baptist church with an often old school family. That’s nothing against them or my upbringing, it’s just a lot of the time for so many of us, the expectation & the reality collide & usually the expectation seems to win.

Think in terms of tectonic plates. One plate represents who you are as a person, the other being who you’re expected to be. As you grow up those plates fight for dominance & eventually one wins. I have always been envious of those who let themselves win over the localized social constructs. To many of us, they bear the name of “black sheep.” I always thought myself a black sheep because the person living inside didn’t match the mask I was presenting, but I let the weight of expectation submerge me.

There are so many things, even to this day at the age of 29 that I wish I could be, so many regrets for times I wished I were bolder or more “me” so that I didn’t have to actively & delicately tear down the person that so many thought I was in order to reestablish the truth. That, however, is a waste of time. Living in regret is giving energy to a past that is already written, not a future that is yours to make. There are so many things I wish I could be outwardly without the fear of losing those I love or feeling their affections diminish. There are so many songs, speeches, blogs that I’ve written, that no matter how much I want to share will probably never see the light of day & that sucks. They are the parts of myself that I continue to lock away out of someone else’s comfort because at the end of the day I am still choosing comfort over the truth.

I hope you’ll do better that me. I hope you will choose yourself. It’s a hard thing, believe me, I know, I just want you all to know that you’re worthy of love as you are, as who you are, unapologetically. You are worthy of love. This is as much a reminder to me as it is to you all but I hope you take it to heart. As I said before, there is a community out there that would love nothing more than to embrace you, as you are, complete & whole with no alterations & no subjugations & I ache for you to find them if you haven’t already. It’s time to pull back the curtain & show the world the beautiful being that you are. It’s time to stop pressing mute on who you are.