And for awhile, it worked. I shed all the old sports-kid stuff and focused on being a music, theater, and arts kid. I started recording music my sophomore year of high school. I saved up my money all year and bought myself a microphone for Christmas (thanks, me!). I recorded directly into my computer without an interface. This was before virtual instruments and before DAWs were really common. I used Cool Edit Pro, which would eventually become Adobe Audition.

No one's ever showed me how to do any of this stuff. I've always had to figure it out on my own.

Around this same time, I stumbled into composition (I learned about it from the one kid in my school who had "perfect pitch") and I was transfixed. No. Hyperfixated. (I wouldn't be diagnosed with ADHD until my 30's!) And for awhile, things were pretty glorious: I was writing and recording my own music, selling CD's for $1 to my classmates, I went to jazz camp in the summer, played in all the music ensembles at the school, and was surrounded by similarly-minded music, art, and theater people.

Looking back, I don't think I had many friends, or even a friend group (not that I could tell the difference at the time), but I was at least surrounded by people with similar interests. I was creating an identity for myself, I was gaining confidence in myself, I was starting to create a future with dreams for myself. I started to feel positive about my future. And then, in my senior year, things changed.

My senior year, I'd experience something that would haunt me for the next ten years, and even now, 16 years later, still gives me trouble.

My high school had a male beauty pageant / talent show. Only seniors could participate. It was always a goofy thing, for example, instead of a "swimsuit" portion, they had a talent portion. And it was a whole show, with choreographed dance numbers, awards, etc. And the whole town would show up. (Remember, I grew up in a rural town that didn't get much entertainment, so anything was a welcome treat.) We didn't have any professionals running things, and so it was student-run. Since I was a music kid, I knew how all the equipment had to be setup, and so in addition to being a contestant, I also ran the sound.

By this time I was deep, deep into Radiohead. They scratched every angsty, weird, artsy itch I felt. And so I decided that for my talent, I was going to play my favorite song by them: Spinning Plates.  I had my whole performance planned out: I practiced the song until it was perfect. I was going to wear a special sweater. I was going to give a deeply vulnerable, emotional performance of my favorite song by my favorite band. It was going to be a big COMING OUT, a celebration of this new identity I had painstakingly created for myself over my entire high school career. I was going to do it in front of the entire town.

As I mentioned, I was never popular (or even well-liked), so I knew I'd never win the competition. All I cared about was having one, beautiful, mesmerizing performance.

And so the time came. I stepped out on stage into the spotlight. The basketball gym was dark but I could see that it was filled to capacity: every chair on the floor was full along with the bleachers on the sides. There had to have been more than a thousand people in the audience. Everyone I had known growing up. My parents, my classmates, my neighbors, my teachers, everybody. I had my special Artsy sweater. This was it.

I sat down at the piano, took a breath, and started playing. My hands were cold (as they usually are during a performance) but I knew the song better than the backs of them. I sang into the microphone that I had setup for myself. The notes poured forth from my fingers. Words and feelings escaped my lips as I proclaimed to everyone I'd ever known in my life this is who I am. I finished, emotionally drained. It was a flawless performance. The audience clapped – polite, muted applause. I shrugged it off as I left the stage. I was high, riding high on endorphins from post-performance rush. The show finished and some kid was crowned the "king".

I bounded into the lobby to greet my supporters. I was hoping and expecting their reactions to match how I felt. To my surprise, they didn't.

I asked them what they thought. They responded by telling me that I shouldn't sing in public again. I was shocked. I asked what they meant. They said it didn't sound good, that I was out-of-tune, and that the song was weird. Rejection. I was beyond hurt; I was devastated. This reaction was from people who were supposed to like me. If they hated my performance, what did that mean for the people who didn't like me? I was embarrassed. I felt like I gave the best performance of my life, and then I found out it was terrible. How was I supposed to trust my compass for what was good and what wasn't? Not only that, and not only did I fail, but I looked like a fool in front of everyone I had ever known. All of them would have seen me giving it my all, it being terrible, and me not knowing how bad it was. Classmates, teachers, strangers, people who knew my parents, everyone saw what a loser I was.

I had put everything on the line, everything about my identity and my being that I had forged anew. Everything I had painstakingly put together after the miserable hell of middle school. After years of bullying, harassment, and public humiliation. My performance was supposed to be a victory lap. Instead, according to people I loved, respected, and trusted the most, it was sad and pathetic. I was absolutely, unequivocally shattered.

What I heard was: you shouldn't sing in public anymore. And so, I didn't.

I wouldn't be diagnosed with Social Anxiety or Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria until my 30's, either.

When I got to college – for Music Education – I discovered I could take composition lessons with one of the faculty, who was a composer. Reeling from my public humiliation a year earlier, I decided to throw myself head-long into composition. I figured that if I could learn how to make my music perfect, I couldn't possibly be rejected. (This wasn't really a conscious thought of mine at the time, only what I realize now looking back, and boy was I wrong, by the way!) And so started my career in composition.

And did have some success in the world of classical music composition: I was awarded several fellowships, I won some awards, I worked and studied with some fancy people in the classical world. I did the elbow-rubbing. I traveled for my work. Rooftop parties. Commissions. I was doing it.

And yet, all the while I felt like I was having success in one area of my life, I felt like I was slowly eroding on the inside. Every fancy piece I wrote, performance I had, place I traveled, felt more and more like a tired magic trick. And during all this time – 10 years – I continued to write and record songs in secret. I used whatever I had for technology. It always found a way out of me, no matter how little I had. I did them quickly and justified them as counterbalances to my "official" music. My "real" music. My Music with a capital "M". What's funny to me now is that even back then, in 2013, when I was still early in my career, I knew on some level that I was living a lie. At that time I took a lesson with composer and performer Ken Ueno, and that one, single lesson has changed the trajectory of my career and life. 

Things came to a head for me in 2019 after I was awarded a Fellowship and Artist Residency at Fresh Inc. Now defunct, it was a musical festival arm of once active Chicago-based new music ensemble Fifth House Ensemble. Through the commission I wrote for them and through my artist residency projects, I realized that I was tired.

I was tired of doing it. I was tired of struggling. I was tired of feeling empty. I was tired of getting less and less back from every project. The music sounded tired to me. It felt tired. 

After getting home, I reflected on the experience and asked myself what my future would look like. I realized that if I felt how I did in my early 30's, it probably wasn't going to feel much different, or better, as I got older. I saw my paths to success becoming smaller, fewer, and farther from one another. I realized I needed a change. I realized that that change could only come from making hard decisions, from growing personally.

I could only make changes if I was willing to change. And so I did.

And so began another new adventure for me. I enrolled myself in therapy to start dealing with all of the clutter in my head and my heard and to figure out what was holding me back. I decided to step away from classical music and honor the part of myself that I had been hiding for so long, for, by that point, 11 years. And I did a bunch of other stuff, too:

• I sang at my first open mic.
• In celebration of my 30th birthday, I did a "30 for 30" release project where I released 30 songs that were important to me from over the years.
• I came up with my first real artist name, August, Stone, and Crow. (If we want to be really snippy, I had a brief, brief stint as "Irksome Mother Orchestra" in high school, then as "Exploding Ghosts" in 2013.)
• I redesigned my website to include my songs.
• I started writing a pitching song demos to an EDM label in the UK.
• I started learning how to *actually* record music, getting, embarrassingly enough, for the first time in my life (in my 30's), an audio interface.
• I started releasing music consistently using a new(!) artist name: AO GRYVE (an anagram for "Voyager")

This was also the time I was diagnosed with ADHD, Social Anxiety, and RSD. For 30 years I had been living, coping, and fighting with and against these things and had no idea.

It wasn't until 2021, after I had been doing things on my own for a couple years, that I realized that I needed help. I felt like I had gotten to the limits of what I was able to accomplish without more help, and so, I sought myself out an artistic coach.

This coach was expensive. So I saved up for an entire year in order to work with them. They seemed legit, like the real deal: impressive numbers and client testimonials. I felt like okay, this is gonna be a game changer for me!

Things started off okay, but after working with the coach awhile, I realized that they didn't know how to help me. It seemed like they had a limited skill set that, while might be helpful for other artists, fell short of addressing my needs. Our weekly coaching sessions melted into him repeatedly telling me that my "lack of success" was because I "just didn't want it bad enough". He weaponized guilt and shame under the guise of "tough love motivation" and then blamed me for his inability to adequately address my needs & concerns. We ended up taking a break, lost touch, and then he disconnected me from his socials. 

I never did finish his program.

So, I was on my own, again.

I rebranded my artist name to Saint Quaint and redoubled my efforts with my new-found knowledge. I released more music. Things still didn't feel quite right.

After a couple more years of grinding and continuing to feel dissatisfied, I finally had a breakthrough:

I had always felt like a loser, a misfit, a outcast. I was never popular or had friends. I wasn't invited to parties. I never felt like people liked me. That wasn't the breakthrough, the breakthrough was: Why fight it? Why not own it?

BOOM.

BAD NOMAD was born.

If I called all my music "bad" first, nobody else could own that. If I called myself a "nomad", nobody could fault me for not "belonging". It gave me ownership over my feelings, my beliefs, and my identity. Having ownership over these things gave me agency to accept myself for who I was, and who I wanted to be. If I was going to be an outsider no matter what I did, I might has well embrace that and serve as a beacon for other misfit weirdos. If I couldn't join the "cool" crowd, then I was going to make my own "lame" crowd and find all the "lame" people just like me.

And so in 2023 I did a MASSIVE release project, not only re-releasing the 30 tracks from years prior, but every finished piece of music I'd ever had a recording of. 22 years of music. Twenty albums, several EPs, and a string of singles; everything I did since I was 13 years old. Everything from every previous artist project, from every previous artist name, all my classical music. 

I released them in chronological order, not just albums, but individual tracks on each album as well. If you really wanted, you could go back and listen to my entire musical journey from the beginning up through present day. The good, the bad, the rough, the unfinished. Every embarrassing piece of juvenilia. 

I did that because I wanted to combine both parts of myself. I used to tell people all the time that I felt like I was living two different creative lives: the polished Composer and the secret songwriter. One was a mask for the other. I also did it because at the time I made all that stuff, I wasn't embarrassed by it. If I could have released that stuff when I was 13, I would have done it. If I knew how to do any of that stuff when I was younger, I would have done it. I didn't know how at the time. And now that I knew better, I knew that the only way to properly honor myself was not to hold anything back anymore. In order for me to move forward, I had to let it go; all that music I had been keeping secret for all those years.

And so I did, re-releasing everything under one umbrella: BAD NOMAD

By the way, if you want to hear any of my stuff click the button below or look for BAD NOMAD on all streaming services.

Teaching has always been the other twin passion of my creative life. Funny enough, it actually also started around the same time I got into music. My 8th-grade year, I started teaching guitar lessons to a kid a few years younger than me. I had only been playing guitar for a year by that point. His mom was a teacher at the school and because of my involvement with theater, was probably the highest-profile guitar-playing student in the school. Also, it was a pretty small school.

I had no idea what I was doing, and I don't think I ended up teaching more than a handful of lessons.

A few years later, when I got to high school, our music director created a program for arts students to get volunteer hours: a peer tutoring program. Wanting volunteer hours, I signed up to help my fellow classmates before and after school. By that point I was pretty dead-set on going to school for music anyway, and I was – relative to my classmates – advanced enough to offer help.

I still didn't know what I was doing, really, but I tried. Further than that, I started to develop a passion for helping others.

By the time I went to college for Music Education, my passion for teaching became more pronounced and articulate. In my second year, one of my professors had us write a personal essay on our teaching philosophy. I was obsessed with inspiring others and thought that this was the highest form of teaching philosophy.

I had no idea what I was doing, and I still laugh about that from time to time when it crosses my mind.

At any rate, I graduated with highest honors and then turned my attention to graduate school to follow and develop my passion for creating music.

After grad school, my first bonified, professional job teaching was a K–8 Elementary / Middle position teaching general music, band, and chorus in Arizona. I also ran a new music ensemble after school – an iPad orchestra. My first year I also did pull-out lessons during school. My 2nd year, I switched them out for a mariachi group and a percussion ensemble. Before I got to the school, they hadn't had a real music program in a number of years. In fact, at our first concert, the audience didn't even know they were supposed to clap when the kids came on stage or when we finished a piece. I built the program from scratch.

We didn't really have any equipment or music. I canvassed the community for donations, working with parents and non-profits. I worked with third-party teacher supply programs and instrument reps. I bought instruments from pawn shops and donated them myself. I got education grants to fund materials and field trips with the students. It was a difficult job. Many of the kids came from difficult home situations. I wasn't perfect at it, and I wasn't really sure what I was doing, but I wanted to be a positive presence in these kids' lives. 

After a couple years, I turned my attention back toward music, enrolling in a post-graduate program that I planned to use as a springboard into a doctoral program.

So I moved back across the country, from Arizona back to New England, and settled in Massachusetts.