I wrote these as a teenager and young adult, planting my fantasies about love all around: in my romantic and platonic relationships alike, in my relationship to the earth and to myself.

These years, I roamed; I hopped between friends houses, traveled to New York for college, to London to stay with friends, and then to Albuquerque.

My childhood accent leaning towards the midwestern intonations of my parents and grandmother shine brightly in these songs. They were played on an old friend’s guitar. It became mine when I was borrowing it and my little brother did a flip over the couch and his foot landed in it. I taped it up, bought my friend a new guitar, and lived with Duct Tape Guitar for a few years. The buzzing! The reverb!

TRAVEL WITH ME

I wrote this song when I was a barista and a very cute girl ordered a chai from me.

I daydreamed about being in a romance with her, and I wrote this song about our fantasy relationship.

The next week, I was on a new friend date at a different coffee shop, and the cute chai girl walked in. In a shocking (!!) moment of chance, the new friend introduced me to cute chai girl. The two of them had just met two weeks prior.

Cute girl ended up becoming my wife for a decade.

We’re still friends. It was a rough few years after the breakup, but she still tells me about her favorite chai. And I still feel so warm about this song.

THE SORRY SONG

I was 18 and all I wanted to do was get back together with my best friend and old boyfriend, Steven. I couldn’t just say it, though, I had to make an opaque song, so thoroughly solid that he couldn’t have known I was apologizing to him. So thoroughly solid that the person I was dating also couldn’t have known I was apologizing to Steven. This is the very Steven of the illustrated, coming-of-age memoir I’m writing, When You Love Nothing, Love Steven.

I LIKE AROUND

I was 19-years-old, my roommate abruptly left mid month and my heroin-addicted father moved in and I was working background in the film industry by day, at the cafe by night, and turned my journals into songs. My girlfriend was living across the country, and my apartment was a mess and she was the only one who cared to clean it up. Nothing mysterious about this song, just a kid working three jobs learning how to pay the rent while her dad wore sunglasses all the time and somehow managed to not overdose on my couch.

AREN’T FORGOTTEN

Another one of those obscure songs where I wanted to write about Steven but combined it with my feelings about another ex, I just couldn’t tell him I missed him.

“I care about you so much I could cry, miss you sometimes that I do.”

I wish I’d written a single song just for this ex, I love them to this day, but our romance was terribly entangled with my Steven heart. It was impossible to love them both at once.

MY CHALK SHADOW

My heroin-addicted father slept on my couch, yelling my cat’s names in the middle of the night, and I dated no one and was in love with everyone. I hopped on every film set I could, played the Winning Coffee Open Mic and house shows and on the grass and in my apartment, wore my guitar across my back wherever I went. One day, I turned on my bathroom light and winced. After adjusting to the light, I sat on the floor and wrote this song.

The colors I list in this song were the collection of crayons I kept in my backpack. I wanted to be loved the way I loved, and I didn’t now how to articulate it, was still trying to telekinetically transmit my needs.

I feel tender about the young person I was when I wrote this song. I picked my dad up from a storage unit when I was 16, and I had vowed to take care of him if he ever needed it. My father was also my dear child.

BIGGER THAN THAT

I was dating cute chai girl, just turned 20-years-old, my heroin-addicted father was in jail and cute chai girl went to San Francisco for an internship. I followed her and felt utterly hopeless about my father, about my siblings, I was angry with Steven and didn’t know what else do beyond follow the dizzying romance with cute chai girl.

MIDNIGHT SNACKING (WITH SARTH)

I wrote this song and recorded it with my little sister. It’s about the house we shared during my adolescence. Our parents had a pack of wolves in the backyard and we all got tickborne illnesses. After our parents split up and we were just living with her dad, I ended up moving out, and in my place, he moved in my old middle school best friend whom my sisters started calling “Mom” and a bunch of snakes which he stored in plastic bins. For more on this, wait for my upcoming memoir, When You Love Nothing, Love Steven. :)