When I was sixteen, I used to think about 2020, saying to myself that I would be sixty then and that’d be strange, but it turned out way weirder than I could have imagined.
16/61 is a set of conversations between my sixteen-year-old self and the more or less present-tense version. The sixteen-year-old gets veto power on all the music, so I designed it to impress. That is, it has some loud stuff!
I have these five songs ready, a nice little EP’s worth with more on the way.
Not so much an archive, 16/61 arrives at an understanding between the two, an alienated runaway teen and an unexpected grownup. I’ve loosely drawn on sounds and music that I made and played as a teen to record now. Sometimes I had music but no words; sometimes vice-versa; sometimes scraps of each. Other times, it was just a sound—tone, really—that I had in my head that made me feel alive; Or maybe a story that was just true enough to run with.
These interior sounds transform when they meet the air. Making them real is a live process, like guitar feedback that grows the tones into things wondrous or terrible (or both!). When they enter a space, the sounds in my head can be shaped and pointed in a direction, ridden like waves, or grown like gardens, but never actually controlled. The experience is more like traveling together than being the boss of it, and I love the trip.
Music remains a place of refuge, a place for working things through, thinking and feeling outside the language box, for the sheer fun of playing to discover what I’ll hear this time.
For this gift – perhaps to you, but foremost just to me—I owe a troubled kid who chose to dream and to dare.