artist statement

A Million Fires is a collection of songs I started writing after moving back to New York from Paris in the Fall of 2005. I wanted these songs to be very straightforward and intimate, as if the listener were sitting with me in my apartment in the unknown hours of the night. They are mostly love songs - the points of departure where lovers have come and gone in the tapestry of my life. The music video for "A Million Fires" weaves this tapestry into a collage of images that expresses what's at the heart of the album. The songs on the album were arranged with piano, cello, and drums. The live show, with its added elements of upright bass, electric guitar, and harmonica, expands the intimacy of the recordings into a dynamic performance that ranges from solo piano ballads to full-on rock and roll.

In the summer of 2004, I had been busking through Europe with The Crooners, an American roots rock band that travelled overseas every chance we had. We eventually made Paris our home base and began spreading our music from country to country; a masquerade ball in the South of France, a wedding in Tuscany, a gig in the oldest blues club in Copenhagen, an outdoor concert in an over-crowded piazza in Florence, Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and back again to the familiar street corners of Paris. That summer, we played to thousands of fans and built our fame and fortune on cobblestones and loose change.

When I moved back to New York, I started writing the songs that eventually became A Million Fires. During that time, I also started producing at HBO where I found a vehicle to expres my love for both images and music. Soldier Song was featured in a promo for the HBO Film Taking Chance and I began working with other musicians to produce music for Cinemax, Generation Kill, and True Blood promos. In 2010, I established FREE MAN MUSIC, a music production company that specializes in custom original music for TV and Film.

At HBO, I met Director and friend Souzan Alavi while working on the campaigns for Real Time with Bill Maher, True Blood, and Lady Gaga's Monster Ball Tour Special. We spent hours in Bryant Park leafing through magazines and coming up with different ideas to shoot. This led to our collaboration on the music video for the title track "A Million Fires.” Souzan grew up fascinated by the realness and beauty of images in her father's medical journals. She came up with the idea to open the video with a heart autopsy that would reveal the traces of a singer's past and expose how we carry our histories in our bodies. We wanted the viewer to literally journey into the heart and mind of the singer and bear witness to the process of leaving the past behind.

During the year it took me to finish the album, I found a new creative outlet making collages. I've always been drawn to collage as a medium. While my songs are about love and loss, my collages deal with the de-fragmentation, fear, and repression I witness in everyday life. They are self portraits that address these struggles; a personal call to overcome the obstacles on my path to freedom.

Everything else I burned in the fire.

Above all, I hope my songs lift people's spirits and move them to love.