An album is a portal, don't shut the door

NEW West Coast tour dates + 1 year of 'Creekbed Carter'

West Coast dates

Against all odds, in spite of everything, I am headed out west to play music for the first time ever! It is already a rodeo! I expect the rodeo will only increase! Come rodeo with me!

Wed April 2 → Portland, OR at The Showdown opening for The Brudi Brothers

Fri April 4 → Cumberland, BC at The Abbey Studio w/ Jack Garton & Secret Beach

Sat April 5 → Victoria, BC at Vinyl Envy w/ Élise LeBlanc

Sun April 6 → Gabriola Island, BC at The Swap Shop

Wed April 9 → Vancouver, BC at Green Auto opening for Leo D.E. Johnson w/ Garish

Thurs April 10 → Bellingham, WA at Honeymoon Ciderhouse w/ Bad Posture Club

Sat April 12 → Vashon Island, WA - details TBA but it’s gonna be gay af

Wed April 16 → San Francisco, CA at Lost Church w/ Nightjars

Thurs April 17 → Locke, CA at The Pearl

Sat April 19 → Pioneertown, CA at Red Dog Saloon w/ Gilbert Louie Ray

Sun April 20 → Los Angeles, CA at Grand Ole Echo

Me, my smudgy mustache, my new record, and the bluebonnets, March 2024.

You ever sit in the bed of a Toyota Tacoma parked on the roof of the remodeled HEB, with an ice cream cone in hand, watching the sun burn a pathway over the city you love to hate, and as the church bells next door begin to chime and your two wonderful friends marvel at the view and a deep feeling of unadulterated contentment warms your core, you think to yourself, I know exactly what got me here and thank fuck it did?

I can tell you without a doubt that making ‘Creekbed Carter’ got me to that rooftop. Thank fuck it did.

Adeliza Backus-Pace took this photo of me in my hand-painted suit in between directing takes of our music video we made for “The Relic Song”

This month marks the 1 year anniversary of releasing my second album ‘Creekbed Carter’ with Gar Hole Records. This anniversary comes buried in a time of chaos and endless streams of executive orders and ongoing genocides and $11 eggs and broken teeth and almost-disasters, in a season that’s knocked more wind out of me than I knew my body could hold. It’d be easy, in my anguish and despair, to let this anniversary pass me by the way I often do with my accomplishments: with a shrug and an “Okay, it happened, time to do it again and maybe do it better.”

But there are times when a project is brave for you, and there are times when you have to be brave for the project. Making ‘Creekbed Carter’ made me get brave. I want to honor that bravery. It was hard-won.

You have to be brave, in the end, to make an album. You have to learn how to say what you need to say, even if it terrifies you: to turn away from the lines that are easy and look left, at the lines that are hard. You have to gather those lines up and put them together. You have to let the songs teach you who you are. When the songs teach you who you are, you have to be brave enough to listen, and even braver to act.

You have to be brave to be on a stage, no matter the county, no matter the time in history; even braver to allow yourself to be trans on that stage. You have to be brave to plan tours promoting the album, to trust people you’ve never met with taking care of you and showing up to listen, to trust yourself and your ability to protect yourself and drive yourself and remember all the right lines and keep your body healthy. You have to be brave to trust the people you’re touring with. Braver still, to handle all the flat tires and tornadoes and venues withholding pay and stalkers and border crossings and bad nights and betrayals and midnight Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supremes that are about to fuck your whole stomach up that you’re only eating because everything else is closed.

You have to be brave to ask people you admire to play instruments on your album. You have to be brave to understand that it isn’t a chore for them, that they’re excited to play music with you, that they like you and maybe even love you and maybe even think your friendship is worth keeping, oh my God, can you imagine. You have to be brave to sit down with one of your favorite living artists and say, “For my album cover I want you to draw me as I see myself.” You have to be brave, weeks later, to look at what they made and understand that they saw you completely, and that you are as they drew you: luminous, ferocious, holy, aflame.

You have to be brave to believe that your art is worth receiving.

Making an album is not for the faint of heart.

And all the bullshitting, all the networking, all the drama, all the navigating, all the emailing and frenetic festival-ing and social media-ing, all the transphobic album reviews and the mean men on TikTok and the industry people who screw you and the parents who cannot love you as you are and the society that spits on you when you ask for a living wage — well, the project has made you brave/you have been made brave for the project, so fuck it.

Fuck all that annoying hard shit, anyway, because the best part of making an album is that an album is an opening.

It’s a doorway to a room filled with people waiting to feel hope and joy and like they belong somewhere, and when you give them that feeling they give it right back to you, until you are all held in an endless spool of light.

An album is a portal through your normally lonely mind to suddenly understanding that you have loved ones in your life, new and old, who show up for you again and again; who nurse you back to health when the album gives you bronchitis; who help you decide things like song order and whether the high hat is too loud on this track and whether the way you’re singing that one line is too cloying; who are thrilled to play your songs with you even though you made no charts and can’t even tell them what key everything’s in; who love you just as you are and miss you when you’re gone.

Making an album is infuriatingly hard and takes forever and is impossible to release and costs too much money and hurts the body and the spirit and at the end of it all, you are braver and stronger and made anew and not alone.

only a few of the folks i met and befriended through this album, i'm a goddamn lucky dude

‘Creekbed Carter’ is 1 year old. It brought me to Arkansas. It brought me to Maine again, to Rhode Island and Ohio and North Carolina, to Canada and Mississippi and Minnesota. Soon, it’ll bring me to the West Coast for the first time since 2018 (when I estranged myself from my family — only an album could make me take on such high trauma healing demands). After that, it’ll bring me East again (keep your eyes peeled!) and then out to Europe for the first time ever (I am shitting myself, frankly!!). It brought me closer to my perfect Little Girlfriend, it brought me closer to my dearest friends on this earth, it brought me light and hope and energy and truth and humanity when the world would have me wither. And it brought me to you. So, thank you, for reading along and listening along and coming to my shows and gifting me buttons and bookmarks and drawings and honey and even weed once, when my back went out mid-set.

Thank you for being here. Here’s to your own portal, whatever it is. May it open you up, spill you out, and make you shine.