What’s the first album you remember loving as a kid?
New Edition. Wore that record out on my Fisher-Price.
What as the first album you bought with your own money?
My brothers and I pooled all our money, went to Peppermint Records in Greenville Mall, and bought Thriller. The crown jewel of any vinyl collection.
What was the first local band that caught your ear?
I played around Greenville some in high school but didn’t really get into any local bands till I moved to Charleston in the late 90s. So at that time it was all about bands like Uncle Mingo which I had little in common with musically but it’s hard if not impossible to not fall in love with saxophone solos played while bouncing on a pogo stick. That’s a party.
What’s the most recent album you bought or have been listening to lately?
Jon Hopkins ‘Singularity’
What were some of the differences in writing this album vs. your solo debut? It seems like the outside world really crept into this one with songs like Professional Network and Great Gasp.
Writing this album was different in that the world I was writing it in made less sense to me than any previous world. So that definitely crept in with songs like ‘Great Gasp’ and ‘Burning Bridge’, trying to figure out what happiness and love look like when everything around you is on fire. Musically, though, I really went as far back into my own past as I ever have on a record. These songs sound the closest to what I was writing in college, pre-Slow Runner, still falling in love with the piano.
