The HATCH website -> https://hatchexperience.com

One year ago to the day, I spent my first day back in Arizona after completing production on “More than Maybe” – the album that has truly changed everything about my life.  I had literally slept on the floor of the studio for most of 8 months, living, dreaming, eating, and breathing recording and songwriting.  I drove for 18 hours straight, collapsed in my bed, slept for 20 hours, woke up and instantly thought, “now what?”

It’s come to me in the time since then that I will simply never know the answer to that question.  I find myself at a similar juncture after nearly 4 months – on and buy cialis online off – on the road.  This last year has been absolutely stunning and incredible, and has really been the year that music has become my actual career.  It’s been my primary passion since I was very young.  In 2009, it started being what made my living.  Now it’s my vocation, my dream, my career, my life… in a way it’s never been before.

I’m terrified, uncomfortable, out of place, surrounded by newness again… and I mean this in a VERY good way.  I’ve been in the company of people that are consistently playing almost every game they play at a much higher level than me.  I’ve been on stages where the lights are bright and the crowd is waiting.  I’ve been so nervous opening for a major label artist that I had to change my guitar part on the fly, because my fingers were shaking too much to play the one I wrote.  I’m better than I’ve ever been, and yet I feel like a beginner again.

It’s a new level, a new playing field, and the culmination of all of it was HATCH.  HATCH is a festival in Bozeman Montana and Asheville North Carolina that was founded by two incredible men – Yarrow Kraner and Scott Billadeau – eight years ago.  The thrust of it is to “hatch a better world” by connecting thought leaders in film, music, technology, design, and architecture with up and coming dreamers, thinkers, and groundbreakers in the same fields.  And it works.  Greatness is born every day, but no one achieves greatness alone.  In fact, it’s easy to wonder if there are tens of thousands of greats out there who simply need a shove, some guidance, some inspiration, someone who’s already doing it at a high level to tell them they can, to light the way.

This year, I was honored at HATCH as a music groundbreaker.  After winning a national competition online, I was invited to join these truly exceptional people for a week at the Bozeman branch of the festival.  While it was exciting to be back in my home town in such company, it really didn’t matter where I was.  It was bigger than that.  From the moment I arrived, I knew there was nothing like it.  HATCH was the most beautiful, brilliant, inspiring thing that I’ve ever been a part of.  I can’t begin to truly describe it.

When I got the word that I had won the online contest, it instantly sent my mind into a frenzy of wondering what it was going to be like.  I had watched videos of previous years.  I vaguely remembered Jeff Bridges and Michael Keaton walking into a Downtown coffee shop and watching me perform a few songs back in 2004 or 2005.  They had been in town for HATCH.   August Rush, a fantastic film about the power of music, had premiered there several years ago, and had gone on to be released nationally in theaters. Almost everyone knows about that movie now. Several of the past HATCH music Groundbreakers are doing amazing things now.

There was a mystery and excitement about the event in my head.  All that considered, I guess I still arrived in Bozeman expecting some sort of exclusive networking thing, where I would get to perform in front of a prestigious crowd and maybe make some connections that would give me a shove in the right direction.

What I found instead, was unparalleled camaraderie, love, and inspiration.  I was pulled to a new level of action, moved to tears, uplifted, forced to think more than I wanted to.  I came with the expectation that I would get to show off a little.  I left humbled, with my heart on fire.

Life will – without a doubt – never be the same again.

Website -> https://hatchexperience.com

To be continued…