A little over two years ago, 'Long Forgotten Dream' struck something deep inside me; I listened to the echo telling me to finally put my music at the forefront of my life. Today, I'm halfway through an 8-show European tour. And I've had the opportunity to play for many of you. Thanks y'all.

On May 1, 2022 (my birthday), I awoke in St. Augustine, two shows through the three-show run at the amp. It was the first day of the life I'm living now.

I was sitting in a taco bar down the road from the venue with one of my best friends, blown away by the previous night's show. We were especially taken aback by Cory Walker (whom you may know as Jarrod's older brother, but who to me is just one of the best and most innovative 5-string banjo pickers alive) stealing the show with his solos in Whitewater and John Hardy.

While attentively stabbing at the mexican cole slaw on my plate so as to accumulate enough on the fork to have a proper bite, I looked up and saw Andy Lytle, smiling at an out-of-earshot anecdote from someone in his small assemblage, who were lined up and waiting to order tacos.

I had met Andy a few times at prior Billy Strings shows, and crossed paths with him occasionally in the St. Pete music scene, where he was a fairly major figure and I was a newcomer, having moved there from Portland in 2020. Here at the taco bar, he came up to me and asked if we knew each other, to which I responded in the affirmative. I told him that we had met a few times, including in Detroit the previous year. "I was in Detroit last year?" he asked. I'll never forget the words within the winds there - this was a man living a life so replete with travel and synergy that it was impractical for him to keep hold of where he'd been the last time the sun had gone round.

...

It took me a moment to recognize the message to relate.

You see, a couple of weeks prior to these events, I had been listening to Home and, at the end of Long Forgotten Dream, I realized with clarity that the echo to which I needed to listen was the one of my own voice imploring me to finally be serious about making music. I had been singing my whole life and playing guitar for 23 years by then, but only started writing songs in the past 3-4. I had also been studying / developing Tuvan throatsinging for 15 years.

I was comfortable. A reasonably accomplished software engineer - a career that frequently took me to conferences around the world - I had no reasons falling from the sky suggesting that a drastic change was in order.

But during my travels to various software conferences, I always felt as called to play music as to hack. And I had built a small but persistent following in that community, presumably because I mostly write songs about the feeling of being alive as the internet emerges as a human evolutionary force.

I had told my friend - the same one with whom I was now occupying the same taco bar as Andy and his crew - that I was filled with the sense that this was to be the year that I became musician first, engineer second, instead of the other way around. I had posited to him a sense that all of cyperpunk culture is a journey backwards through the seams toward traditional music - that the sharing of songs in the absence of an IP-industrial-complex planted bluegrass as a building block of the internet-connected human. That the destiny of the internet age - centuries and millennia ahead - was being tuned by traditional music as our days march on.

...The kicking and screaming had subsided; I longed no more for a vessel to carry my thoughts in...

"I think I need to go get my guitar and force a song on these people", I told my friend.

One thing to understand: this person isn't just an acquaintance. He's a true friend. Someone who tolerates no bullshit - who will stop at nothing (not even discomfort - usually the bane of friendships) to make me a better person.

"Do it," he replied.

"Really?!" I implored, hoping instead he'd somehow justify my taking the safe and comfortable path of enjoying my lime mahi mahi in silence.

"I mean, yeah. If you see a chance to do something you need to do, then you need to do that."

It happened that my guitar was in my cargo bike, which was parked just outside the front door.

I grabbed it and endeavored to turn this old familiar nightmare into a song. The stakes for my ego were high; it was altogether possible that what I was about to do was to interrupt our favorite sound guy's lunch with an embarrassment impossible to live down.

By the time I tuned my guitar and felt the atmospheric friction churning up above, Andy and his friends/family had already received their food and were sitting on the back patio.

I sat down and asked if it was OK for me to play a song for them. Andy politely (but not enthusiastically) said, "sure."

I knew I had one chance, and that, as first impressions go, people seem as impressed by my throatsinging as anything else I do, so I went with an original song with a fair bit of throatsinging ("The Morning of the Bank Run").

During the song, I looked into the eyes of this little crowd and detected wonder, without a doubt. And during my second throatsinging solo, they all got out phones and tried to record me. I stopped abruptly, not wanting to give away too much (perhaps shrewdness, perhaps shyness).

Afterward, Andy offered me his phone number. Seemed impossible for that to be a bad sign, I thought.

That night, my birthday, Billy and the boys played Long Forgotten Dream, and I cried.

I texted Andy a few days later, and he asked me to come and volunteer at his festival - the Orange Blossom Jamboree - where the Walker Brothers (billed as "The Suwanne Mountain Boys") were again slated to take the stage.

I happily accepted the invitation and started getting my bus ready for a camping weekend.

While at the festival - which was mired but not degraded by very intense rainstorms (even for Florida) - I volunteered several shifts at the gate and met much of Andy's crew, and got to hang with him a fair bit. I was really impressed by his ability / willingness to actually partake in the fun and social exchanges of the event. In my experience, it's very difficult for an event organizer to do that, and it speaks volumes to the trust he places in his team and his sense of how to delegate. I knew that, for example, he had a strong belief that people were likely to stick around and help clean up the festival grounds afterward. And for that belief to be true, people like me had to make it true.

So I resolved to find him the morning after the festival, and to be fresh enough to offer my labor, my insights, and my cargo bike to get shit done. And indeed, when I awoke to the Florida Sunshine and found him, he was surrounded by fires to put out. I walked right up to him, put my hands on his shoulders, and said, "Andy, I'm here - direct me." Not needing to be asked twice, he immediately started giving me jobs. Between breaking down stages, folding furniture, hitching-and-unhitching trailers, and updating various others on the radio, I made him coffee and food in my bus.

Hours later, with the festival wrapped and a crew of happy, healthy, sweaty volunteers taking a bit of pride at our work, I told him that I had a favor to ask. "I had a feeling - tell me what you need dawg," he replied.

I told him what I've just told you all above - that I had been moved to examine the trajectory of my life and figure out how to do what I'm truly called to do - pick my guitar and tell stories of love and collaboration and inclusion amidst the network protocols and APIs. I told him I had no idea what to do next, but that I thought that working with Cory Walker was worth pursuing, as I loved his sound.

Andy told me that he'd text me in a few days with some ideas.

I nodded and hid the partial sinking of my heart. I knew that Andy was soon to go back on tour with Billy, and that there was very little likelihood of ever reaching the top of his priority list in the precious intervening time.

However, as I often am about such things, I was wrong. Two days later, Andy facilitated an introduction to Skyler Golden, a wunderkins Florida producer and former guitarist of Ajeva. Sky had been sidelined by a wrist injury and so had taken to production and engineering full-time. Andy warned Cory Walker to expect our inquiry. Both Sky and Cory have since become dear friends (and the former is across our Czech hotel room as I type this).

Skyler produced my first song with Cory (Nanny State Fiddler), and then assisted in the production of my first album (Vowel Sounds) last year. He now plays bass in my touring band. This year, we played with / recorded with Cory again, and also with David Grier, Harry Clark, Maddie Denton, Kyle Tuttle, Jake Stargel, Gaven Largent, Sam Grisman, and John Mailander. The new record (4masks) will be out later this year, and I'm very excited for y'all to hear it.

As I sit typing this, I'm in Roudnice, in the Czech Republic, where my music has a budding fanbase (owing in no small part to my mandolin player, Jakub Vysoky, and fiddler, Kuba Hejhal, hailing from here).

And perhaps most significantly, we have pieced together the myriad connections from traditional music to The Grateful Dead to The WELL to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to modern cypherpunk groups in the ethereum community. I've discovered that there is a huge undercurrent within blockchain tech which, rather than being focused on finance and scams, is focused on building an internet which incentivizes regeneration rather than extraction, and on programmatically making poverty obsolete.

Tomorrow we play here in Roudnice. The following night in Prague. Then two shows in Berlin - Saturday and Tuesday. Then back home to the USA.

Thanks for reading.

Do you listen for the echo of your long forgotten dream? You should listen for the echo of your long forgotten dream.