"A singer-songwriter of uncommon depth."
Luke Carton was eighteen years old in 1848; a young man in a world of revolutions: “The Springtime of the Peoples.” Likely born in Wexford, Ireland around 1830, the spirit of the age took hold in Luke’s life as more than nationalism uprooting an old order and replacing it with a new–his entire life was…
I wrote the following passage during a Covid-19-induced fever. It was intended to be the start of a young-adult piece of fiction. I recorded the voice of the computer reading it, then set the entire thing to a musical backdrop of acoustic and digital sounds. I have since written more of this story, but decided…
Some songs are prompted by a phrase you think or hear, or a chord progression you like, or fully formed statements you want to craft into lyrics. Other songs are puzzles–narratives you want to piece together, loosely connected observations you’re convinced fit together, or points you want to work your way towards. This song was…
Depression. We talk about it like it’s a hole, a swamp, a muddy trench. The “slough of despond,” the “pit of despair,” a “ditch” we fall into. For me, in 2018, depression was an all out war, and I was losing. It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in the trenches and it’s not…
Leesburg, OH. I’ve been there in my mind only. The Buckeye State claims a host of landlocked towns which would have been home to plenty of young, overtired pioneering farmers in the 1830’s. And with the mighty Lake Erie along its northern edge, it serves as a plausible backdrop for the narrative of this song….
In 1783 the Montgolfier brothers made the first public demonstration of manned balloon flight. The dawn of mankind in the sky had arrived, and news spread quickly. Goethe was 34 years old when this happened–the same age as I am today. He, like much of the world, was taken up in the unprecedented excitement of…
