I grew up reading a lot.
Not just because I wanted to, but also out of a sense of self-preservation. I’ve always been a loner, overwhelmed by too many external stimuli. Books were a refuge that helped me make sense of a world that a whole lot of times seemed like it had none.
Throughout elementary school, I gravitated toward thriller authors like R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike. In middle school I graduated to Stephen King and Dean Koontz, two guys who are still churning books out. As I went into high school and college, my reservoir of contemporary faves grew and diversified: Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Ted Chiang, Don Winslow, Charlie Huston, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Whenever I’m confused about something, or bothered or curious, reading allows me to leave whatever room I’m in and travel through the world of literature to find an answer.
Art in general does this, serving as both a mirror and a door.
At some point, I stopped just loving art and needed to make it. Creation became the forward motion of life, what made me want the next hour, next day, week, month, years.
I still get the same chill whenever I finish anything I’ve been working on, followed immediately by the desire to create something else.
Near the end of elementary school, my parents bought a piano for the house, a black Wurlitzer some men wheeled in one day and installed in the living room. They also bought some beginner’s piano method books and got me practicing a couple times a week. But it wasn’t until middle school that I started taking formal lessons.
What drew me to piano most was the theory, because of the math in it. I’ve always been drawn to patterns, and I love that music can be counted, the beauty of sound graphed in fractions and ratios that sync with the metronome in our ears so hearing something beautiful is equivalent to hearing something mathematically sound.
All in all, I took piano lessons for about four years before I quit in ninth grade, a casualty of my high school desire to seem cool which required not caring so much about things that could get me labeled a nerd.
I learned just enough throughout those four years of lessons to know that something is happening when a simple musical chord instantly changes a person’s mood, though I can’t tell you exactly what that something is.
I spent most of the piano years trying to learn the beginning section of my favorite piano arrangement: Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
I never mastered it. I did get to the point where I could play it, slow but clean.
Felt like my first artistic win.
Admission.
Senior year 2002 I committed the same crime most of my peers did back then: bootlegging off Napster/LimeWire.
Aside from .mp3 files that took half an hour to download and occasionally gave your computer digital herpes, I also downloaded a few programs that came with the same risk factors. One of them was Sonic Foundry ACID Pro, a sound mixing program I immediately got hooked on.
Eventually I used ACID Pro to make dancehall and hip-hop mixtapes that imitated the mixtapes I grew up on from DJs like Black Chiney, Chinese Assassin, Renaissance and DJ Khaled (before “We the Best!” when he used to be on 99 Jamz). I called the series the C.A. Mixtapes, C.A. short for Caribbean Alliance, the name my friends and I gave our crew back in middle school.
I made ten C.A. mixtapes between 2002 and 2006, mostly sharing them with friends. I still have them somewhere on some fossilized external hard drive.
I learned two things during this first foray into sound production: 1) the basics of mixing, and 2) that I could sit for hours at a computer screen staring at soundwaves without getting bored.
Music became therapy as well.
For much of the beginning of 2004, in the aftermath of two friends being murdered and me subsequently failing out of my first year in college, I didn’t leave my room for months. And though the future got blurry as hell, I look back now and see clearly that the music — that series of mixtapes in particular — helped me venture away from a cliff I was a lot closer to than I wanted to admit at the time.
Because there’s no point in putting that much time into making something if you’re not going to put it out there.
I eventually got back on track, ending up at Florida State by the end of 2006. At FSU, I pivoted all my artistic energy into becoming a writer. Not to say my musical aspirations disappeared; I just went back to being a consumer.
That is, until my junior year when I bought my first guitar; an Epiphone I mostly stared at, occasionally wrestling with the thing and coming away bruised (developing calluses is an unpleasant process).
By grad school, I’d purchased my first electric too, an Ibanez I got because I’d read that Cobain liked them.
Those years, learning the basics was easier because of my history with the piano. The math of it all translated.
But even then, I still didn’t really start trying to make my own music until years later, in 2017, when I sat down and wrote my first song complete with lyrics and guitar chords. Which opened the floodgates.
Soon, I was spending all my free time writing songs and making beats, first on the GarageBand app on my iPhone, then GarageBand on an old MacBook laptop, then GarageBand on an iMac before making the switch to Logic Pro. At every step, I produced with two rules: make it sound better than the last time I did it, and make myself smile.
In that, my life and my music follow the same path.
From learning ACID Pro during one of the most transitional periods of my life, to the Epiphone at FSU after leaving my parents’ house for the first time, to my forays into beat-making that taught me how to assert my own style, to the first album I produced during a worldwide pandemic.
Music has helped steady me at every single moment, especially when life felt like — in the words of Macbeth — nothing but a brief candle.
Which brings me to the song I just released: “Right Time”
The United States is buzzing like a Miami transformer in a hurricane, ready to pop. In my four decades on Earth, born and raised in Dade County, I’ve never seen a more tumultuous time in this country. And I can only think of a few major turning points in U.S. history that rival this moment.
Every day there’s a new head-scratching and horrifying headline. Each fresh story comes with an internal battle of wanting to ignore it all while also needing to stay informed. In chaotic times, people choose all sorts of remedies to stave off existential fears.
I choose art. Writing and music. That’s my lane.
I trust the First Amendment. I trust protest. Protesting has a thousand instruments. I’ve got a master’s degree in English and a couple decades’ worth of music-making experience, so those are the avenues I’m comfortable navigating for self-expression.
“Right Time” is about that.
It’s about the right time to flex your strength as an intelligent individual with working critical thinking skills. It’s about the right time to do what we can to get this country back on track.
Lawyers should protest with the law.
Politicians should protest with politics.
Police officers should protest with real policing.
Coders should protest in code.
Engineers, doctors, scientists.
College English professors, like me.
“Right Time” is the intersection of everything I’ve been up to now, everything I am, and everything I hope to be in the future for myself, my family, and this country. From the kid counting eighth notes on his parents’ piano to the teenager dragging loops in a dark room to the man standing at the head of a classroom asking his students to embrace the beauty in words.
To just embrace something.
So, press play. If you like it, pass it on.
