ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE | 4 APRIL 2026 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Have you sensed it yourself? The sensation that physical reality is an illusion, hologram, or even game? It’s a sense I have on an increasingly permanent basis as I move towards the position in life I believe I’m meant to be in. It comes with a grounded knowing in my gut, and a confidence that everything is as it should be; challenges there for a reason, roadblocks intentional, serendipitous meetings meant to be, and beauty inevitable.
It’s an extension on the translucent river concept described in ESSAY 21; the sense that there is a dimension beyond physical reality that connects things energetically, without being bound by time or distance. The allegory of the cave, presented to me by a Greek filmmaker friend on Hydra last year, famously comes from Plato’s ‘Republic’, presenting the hypothesis that all of physical reality is a projection of a more fundamental reality.
Imagine yourself in a cave, with a fire in the centre, friends around. The light of the fire casts shadows of figures on the wall of the cave - dancing and flickering - recognizable in shape but distorted by heat and smoke - and certainly not representing the full actualization of what is going on. It’s a mirage, but enough to be a believable story. This is Plato’s theory on human existence - that three dimensional reality is only a compelling projection of something far more fundamental - and I believe him.
So what do we do with this information? Well I’ll tell you a practical element it’s given me; peace. More consistently as the years progress and my mind naturally observes indications that this hypothesis is true, I slip gradually deeper into a knowing that everything is okay, as it should be, and inevitable. Yes of course agency and action are required in life, but when one has done all one can do, one can have peace and confidence in not only themselves, but in the progression of life, others, and the world.
Image: Plato's allegory of the cave by Jan Saenredam
THE HORSE IN THE CIRCLE | 29 MARCH 2026 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
A premonition, February 2025, that there would be a theme to my year - the ways in which energy binds things together. I’ve spoken about adjacent or tangential topics in the past, but there have been multiple angles on it presented to me simply through living life. One of the most visceral was the horse in the circle.
13 March 2026, I perform a sold-out concert in Prosser, Washington State where I start to draw the parallel between the moments I access the emotional memory at the genesis of a song, and see the audience moved in parallel with that moment. I see a thread - non physical, but undeniable. After the show, a local ranch-owner invites me riding the next morning in the local mountains, famous for their association with wild horses through The Horse Heaven Hills along the Columbia River. I jump at the opportunity.
She invited me into a round pen to teach me about the energetic connection between rider and horse. Beginning by educating me on the physical signs to look for in the horse - the separate ears, the breathing, eyes and orientation, then the physical movements I can articulate to direct the horse. Finally, she guides me in experimenting with the power that pure internal vision & intention have over the horse. Dropping all physical motions and almost telepathically communicating with the horse, I would hold images and intention of her moving, and she would; faster, slower, closer, farther.
It left me convinced beyond articulation of a power we can’t see. A series of thoughts followed: a cognizance of responsibility in keeping one’s internal world pure enough to ‘see’ in the first place - grounded and calm - enough to read the signs, and strongly aligned enough to communicate back. The confidence to work with those forces, interacting with them rather than passively noticing things - powerfully aware of how this one phenomenon with the horse in the circle, can be applied to so much of life; from clearly navigating communication in relationships, to being effective as a musician with the intent of conveying an emotion, to day to day interaction with the world and serendipitous encounters that lead to the greatest adventures.
OBSCURITY WITH INTEGRITY | 21 MARCH 2026 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, gurus selling courses, everyone telling everyone else how everything is done, unsolicited, aggressively marketing in our faces at a disorienting rate - I can’t do it anymore, and I know a lot of us can’t.
I spent 4-years on the album I’m currently releasing. I went through the heartbreak, I stood on top of the cliffs, I travelled with the guitar, I sat isolated in rooms refining compositions for weeks on end, I put every last cent into its recording and the commitment to make something beautiful that deserved to last just as much as the great works I’ve always looked up to. But yesterday I found myself cutting my songs up, to distribute them on TikTok in 15-20 second digestible form because streaming numbers are low and we all need visibility to build the business model.
It’s Saturday morning in London, the beginning of Spring, and I’ve just decided that I’m not going to fucking do it. Actually it’s deeper than that - I can’t do it. The same artistic soul (yes I’m going to be that grandiose) that enables me to make music that makes people cry is the same artistic soul that is going to say fuck you to the framework I’m ‘supposed’ to fit into. I’d rather die with integrity in obscurity than participate in this shit that fries everyone’s nervous systems and competes for attention. Whatever happened to beauty as a standard to live by? Things that were sacredly created, cared for, and whispered around because we knew the delicacy of real human things.
This scene (pictured below) from the 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona resonates with my soul on a yearly basis since I first saw it. And while I don’t believe in the ‘punishment’ aspect of it, the disregard for public attention is something I can. This isn’t a tantrum, but an inability to abandon my values - I know I’ve made something beautiful - and if the world ever wants to hear it, they can, but I’m not going to take on the position of fighting in a crowded room. The right souls will find it if they're meant to. And in the meantime, I'll keep making things worth finding.
Film: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 2008
THE TRANSLUCENT RIVER | 22 JANUARY 2026 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Over the past four years of travel and work, I’ve begun to make clearer observations about the nature of life, the world, and the universe. Observations that touch on spiritual principles, but ones proven to me in a lived, real-world way. The most significant of these is what I’ve come to think of as the translucent river.
I imagine it as a dimension beyond physical reality; beyond the three dimensions of space, with time as the fourth, and this translucent river existing as a fifth. It’s a visual language I use for myself to describe what I’ve repeatedly witnessed; an undeniable plane in which events, places, and people are connected by invisible threads. These connections are not bound by time or distance, nor by rational sequencing. They simply exist, and at this point in my life, their existence feels undeniable.
This perception hasn’t arrived through doctrine or belief systems, but through a lifetime of observation. Through travel, long stretches of solitude, and the kind of meditative time that has marked both my most creative periods and the repetitive monotony of touring. I’ve encountered this pattern too many times to dismiss it. That experiential certainty, to me, carries more weight than anything a spiritual or religious text could offer.
With this perception comes a reverence for the underlying order and beauty of life, and a quiet trust in it. That trust doesn’t make me passive. If anything, I’ve come to believe that the translucent river requires participation. One has to live with enough clarity and calm to sense it, and enough courage to recognize it when it appears, and interact with it.
Staying in communion with this current has led me to some of the most meaningful experiences of my life: unexpected journeys, musical collaborations, romantic arcs, and lessons that only arrive through the right company at the right moment. It has brought me to real thresholds of growth and understanding; of myself, and of others. And it’s given me a belief that if I remain attentive to it, things will unfold as they’re meant to, in their proper way and time.
That belief brings a kind of peace, one that exists beyond anything offered by the first four dimensions.
LIKE THE NIGHT ITSELF | 17 JANUARY 2026 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
1961, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman play two jazz musicians in post-war Paris. Their guitarist - Gypsy, they call him - is unraveling. Addiction has eroded his relationships, his musicality, his sense of self. One morning, Newman’s character takes him down to the banks of the Seine to confront Fausto: once a great musician, now a pusher.
“I knew him,” Gypsy says quietly.
“The greatest of the flamenco guitarists.”
“He used to play like … like the night itself.”
I was drawn to the guitar at eight. By twelve, my mother was waiting up at midnight while I played blues and jazz bars. At fourteen, I was on my first international tour, and soon after I was opening shows for Tommy Emmanuel, crossing borders, seeing the world - all while carrying a fracture I didn’t yet understand.
That fracture widened. At twenty-one, I found myself in Paris, no longer playing my instrument, my life in pieces. Like Gypsy, I had drifted far from the thing that once anchored me.
Fast forward to now. A week ago, Tommy and I spoke about how the past decade - all of it - was not wasted time, but preparation. The slow construction of a human being and a musician with something worth saying, the capacity to say it, and the resolve to follow through. That opening line you hear at the start of ‘Like The Night Itself’ isn’t decorative. It marks a departure - from vocation, from self - and a return. A near end, and a reclamation of the place I’m meant to stand. It’s why this is the first song of the album. And why the video, shot on the banks of the Seine at night this past summer, exists at all.
The song was released January 1. What follows is the video below - and, in time, perhaps a deeper exploration of what Like The Night Itself has come to signify: a refinement of artistry toward something more majestic, and an electric current found equally in muse and in music.
Video: Like The Night Itself | Kyran Daniel
En Partenariat Avec | Larson Bros. Guitars
Cinématographie | Boubkar Benzabat
Tourné le 27 Août 2025 | © 2026 Kyran Daniel
INFINITE FINALITY | 15 JANUARY 2026 | London, United Kingdom
I’ve always been drawn to Caravaggio. Not only by the aesthetic - the dramatic chiaroscuro, Renaissance colouring, scenes that feel human yet mythological at the same time - but by the way his work acknowledges darkness without glorifying it. There’s grit, and a confrontation with the darker sides of life, or one’s own personality, soul, character - yet those realities are framed against a noble desire for enlightenment. Maybe that’s why he spoke to so many people. Maybe that’s why he still does. Even without deeper analysis, I feel these things.
So, with Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing marking the threshold of this next chapter - a hand, symbolically (both metaphorically and literally) writing one’s life story - I move into 2026 confronting my own mortality for the sake of character development. An acceptance of finitude, not as limitation, but as the condition that gives weight to what follows. Because if you begin with the end in mind, so much falls away. What I think of as ‘standardised Western existence’ no longer feels essential to keep up with, and richer human pursuits - those that develop and deepen the soul, individually and collectively - emerge as the true metrics of a life well lived.
So while streaming numbers, playlist placements, vinyl sales, audience size, and money in the bank all matter this year, they are not the axis. They are finite measures. Useful, but not eternal. Days, weeks, and months that contribute to the deeper arc - creating work that moves people, walking friends home, loving for love’s sake, art for art’s sake - must remain the North Star. Finite acts, chosen deliberately, in service of something I hope outlives me.
Image: Caravaggio - Saint Jerome Writing
CONTRAST | 13 JANUARY 2026 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Personal and universal. Human and synthetic. Grand and delicate.
These were not conceptual decisions so much as necessities - forces that insisted on being present in the album I’ve just completed. I didn’t reason my way toward them; they arrived intuitively, as contrasts tend to. There is something fundamental about polarity - about meaning revealing itself only when placed against its opposite.
In more recent experience, this polarity has widened. Not just moment-to-moment, but macro-scale: months of intensity, immersion, velocity, followed by periods of near stillness, where everything feels suspended, emptied out, waiting. I’m fortunate to have friends who move through life with a similar poetic, non-judgemental attentiveness, people who understand that this oscillation is not pathology, but structure. That this, too, is the nature of things.
Sound itself obeys this law. A longitudinal wave; compression and release. Peak and valley. The amplitude; the distance between them, is what determines loudness. And I am not someone built for a quiet life. Still, there is a sobering clarity in recognising that the universe appears to demand equivalence; that every summit of intensity may require a corresponding descent.
Homer offers a consoling inversion. In The Iliad, the gods are said to envy humans, not for our power, but for our capacity to feel. For the fact that our lives are finite, and therefore charged. Joy and grief, love and loss, exhilaration and boredom are inseparable, and it is precisely this fragility that gives experience its weight. Knowing this, I would choose intensity every time.
So I move into 2026 with the same resolve, now sharpened rather than softened: full commitment to the work I feel called to make, and a deliberate refusal of anything that does not align. I trust that this commitment keeps me in right relation with the world, that I will be met and supported. But I no longer romanticise the cost. This way of living carries real risk. Real vulnerability. Real pain.
And still, I would not trade it. Because I can feel the next ascent gathering. And it is higher than the last.
Image: Apollo and Dionysus, by Leonid Ilyukhin (Apollo representing order, reason, light, logic, self-control, purity. Dionysus representing chaos, irrationality, passion, emotion, frenzy, instinct.
ON WHY ART MATTERS | 27 DECEMBER 2025 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Why create, why perspire, why bare one’s artistic soul to the world? These were questions I found myself asking after a conversation where I realized that I no longer have any capacity to spend my life on anything other than what it’s meant to be spent on. This almost alchemical search for meaning, story, depth, connection, has taken over me in recent years. In a process of rapid maturation and identity integration, all that is excess has burned away. I find myself more compelled by moments with strangers that have an essence of humanity than by any egoic need to claim material or energetic space.
But we all have to have a way of being. And I can’t merely sit here waiting for life to collide with me (although it always does in beautiful, somewhat cinematic ways, as anyone close to me knows). To live the life of an artist - what does that mean, and does it have intrinsic value?
Yes, it does, because it cures what underlies all these contemplations: the desire to know that life, existence, effort, love - all of it - actually means something.
A connection with the world, and the searching for it, and the maintenance of it, and the development of it - and then the sharing of those discoveries - is sustenance to the human spirit. It reminds us that there is, and always has been, a soul at the centre of things, and that it is something we all recognise when we encounter it. Art, true art - channelled from something beyond the self and shaped patiently by the hands of a caring craftsperson - is material proof of this. Each time we encounter it, we are reminded that our inner longings are not isolated phenomena, that others have felt this same ache, this same reverence, this same quiet urgency to understand and to express.
Art matters because it slows time. Because it dignifies attention. Because it allows us to sit with what would otherwise pass unnoticed. It creates a shared interior space where meaning is not dictated, but offered. Where questions are held open rather than resolved. Where beauty is not an indulgence, but a form of truth.
To live as an artist, then, is not to withdraw from life, but to enter into it more fully - to pay closer attention, to feel more deeply, and to take responsibility for translating experience into something that can be received by others. It is an ethical stance as much as an aesthetic one. A commitment to presence. A refusal to live numbly or cheaply. A choice to honour what is fleeting by giving it form.
So I move into 2026 with a deeper resolve to live this way - in conscious relationship to the world, to people, to place, to time - trusting that the act of paying attention, of making meaning, of offering something honest and well-made, is not only worthwhile, but necessary. Not as a claim, not as a performance, but as a quiet contribution. A signal, sent into the dark, that says: I was here, I felt this, and I cared enough to shape it.
NOTES ON THE IRREDUCIBLE | 18 DECEMBER 2025 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
As we enter the era of AI-generated music and art, a familiar question keeps surfacing: is there any value left in anything human made? For me, the answer arrived in a surprising way. Not as a defense of human originality, and not as a fear of replacement - but as a recognition that the most meaningful works of art were never purely human-made to begin with.
There is a difference you can feel between a song that is constructed through skill, experience, and analysis, and a song that seems to arrive fully formed - gifted from some divine other world. I’ve written about this before: the distinction between music assembled from technique and music that feels received from somewhere beyond conscious effort.
This was an argument I used to make for myself 2-3 years ago in LA as I began removing priority from my songwriting & production career, suggesting that what we were doing was not necessarily the embodiment of being an artist, but something mechanical, systematic in its analysis and recreation of effective songwriting and production techniques into songs that were ‘good’, and optimized to trigger response. But the moment a machine (AI) began to rise to be able to more efficiently repeat that process, was the moment I realized that what I was doing wasn’t actually art.
So in 2023, I crossed the Atlantic again, this time to Greece, and began working on this album alongside my reading of the Greek myths. And as the project unfolded, through performance, travel, heartbreak, stillness, beauty, I noticed something unmistakable. The pieces that moved people most were not the ones I labored over. They were the melodies that arrived effortlessly: under a mulberry tree in Samothrace, along the cliffs of Nocelle, on a quiet terrace in Tuscany. These moments didn’t feel authored, they felt encountered. If I’m honest, I can’t claim ownership over them. They don’t feel like mine in the way craft does. They feel bestowed - gifts from somewhere else.
So am I cornered? Yes. I’m forced in a very real-world way towards having to believe wholeheartedly in something divine as the soul of song, and to trust that these melodies will move hearts, earning a valuable place on Earth that can’t be replaced. This idea isn’t new. Many composers across history have described themselves not as creators, but as channels. What feels different now is the necessity of that belief. In an age where machines can imitate technique, it is presence, vulnerability, and receptivity that remain irreducible. If music still matters, it’s not because humans can out-produce machines, it’s because true art that touches the soul cannot be generated - only received.
INK, CLAY, WOOD & STEEL | 12 DECEMBER 2025 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
In recent weeks I’ve had some moments of despondency lamenting what I see as a pointlessness in contributing any more to commercial/pop music ventures in light of recent AI developments. It feels futile to create work that will be so easily lost amongst the deluge of artifice about to rain down upon us. The same could be said of the film industry, and I know painters & photographers are having their challenges too.
But as with every cultural movement, there’s a counter-culture. What if, as consumers of art, we are already consuming from a poisoned well (I know how much I manipulate, edit, and tune a pop record), and that by AI pushing this envelope, we all react by returning to value what is real; ink, clay, wood, human things. Objects and sounds made with a heart, soul, and fingerprints. Things we can treasure, because they have a soul given to them through the hands of another.
I have visions of my grandfather, his weathered hands working on wooden sailboats in his shed. A friend sitting in her kitchen bathed in warm evening light, intuitively forming clay into an aesthetic pottery that feels millennia old. Or a guitarist, the instrument nothing more than a box of wood & steel, played with such touch that it incites the deepest memories, nostalgia, and raw emotion from an audience. If this is truly the cultural shift that might occur, I think collectively the movement has the potential to be very healing for us. And maybe we’ve needed it for a while.
INTRODUCING - LIKE THE NIGHT ITSELF | 22 NOVEMBER 2025 | HYDRA, GREECE
In conjunction with ArtCinema and Old Carpet Factory Recording Studio, we present an introduction to the heart & concepts behind my debut album 'Like The Night Itself'.
Hydra Coverage: Antonis Sotiropoulos | New York City Coverage: Austin Charles Williams | Cover Photo: Sara Mahouachi
ARTCINEMA | ARTIST INTERVIEWS | 7 OCTOBER 2025 | HYDRA, GREECE
As part of ArtCinema 2025, I had the pleasure of discussing the intersection of art, inspiration, and philosophy with three of this year’s phenomenal artists; Annu Yadav, Stephen Appleby-Barr, and Vittoria Berardinone. From contemplations on contrast & polarity, to the benefit of unfavorable conditions, and bridging cultures through art and design, it was a pleasure to hear and discuss these perspectives on an island long synonymous with artistic depth and devotion.
AMOR FATI PART TWO | ARTISTIC FATALISM | 28 SEPTEMBER 2025 | HYDRA, GREECE
“You’re an artist.” The same phrase, spoken at 1 a.m. in an Hydra Island bar, has echoed across dinner tables, London parks, Paris subways, and intercontinental FaceTime calls these past months. A message I hear from friends and strangers frequently these days. It was my goal, but maybe I’ve sealed my own fate. Maybe there’s no other ‘way’ for me. Nothing rooted in practicality, even less in three-dimensional reality.
I suspect it was always in my field of existential potential. To be clear, this isn’t self-congratulatory - it’s an acceptance of a potentially cruel fate, simultaneously pregnant with the potential for equal or greater beauty. What is one meant to do when all attempts at traditional or pragmatic life feel blocked or impossible, but the serendipitous artist’s path unfolds without effort, asking only for perceptiveness and engagement, almost with a sense it’s encouraging me to walk alongside it? Amid my rejection of my own artistic identity, it seems to unfold, like a universe opening in the ether - a hallucinogenic trip with no walls, only infinite doors behind doors within doors.
This has been my experience since I began a beautiful acquiescence to my art three-years ago. Even after exhaustion and recent resolutions to live more practically, it returns, stronger than ever, vivid enough to almost feel personified. And it’s no longer tied exclusively to music, but seems attached to me like a spirit walking me through this plane of existence. To trust, listen, experience - despite all practical fears - and channel what asks to be channelled.
Image: Hydra, Greece
SIRENS | 17 September 2025 | London, United Kingdom
This coming October I’ll be performing at the phenomenal ArtCinema Hydra - a three day curation of international cinema, art, dance, music, fashion, literature and photography, on this storied Greek Island in the Aegean.
Hydra was where I began recording the album. Living in the attic of OCF Studio, at the time still under renovation, owned and run by the legendary Stephan Colloredo-Mansfeld, and sat high on ‘the rock’ overlooking the port below. Hydra is one of those geographical centers where there is undeniably something energetic in the Earth creating a viscerally heightened experience of life, creativity, sexuality, and contemplation. It was here that the relationship with my muse ended, tragically, heartbreakingly, while she was in India and I was in these waters and on these rocks, walking barefoot through the quiet alleys, drunk at 4am being shown into the house of the late Leonard Cohen, I too became intoxicated by the island; the energy, the vortex, the sirens.
A siren I’ve since learned doesn’t have to be a woman. Maybe I’d have known this if I had the patience at the time to make it through Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. But vices, distractions, psychological schisms that cause disruption and fragmentation of one’s path. I fell victim to these, time and time again through the three year journey of the creation of these works. Until I too covered my ears and tied myself to the mast of my own ship.
I’m not sure what the current day equivalent of this is, but it’s working. A focussed path led to the completion of the album, and exploration into my next creative and professional routes. It feels profound to return to the island amongst such a stellar lineup of phenomenal international artists, as a slightly improved version of myself, with a more developed and clarified path, and resolve to not be shipwrecked.
Image: The Siren - John William Waterhouse
THE VITAL NECESSITY OF A MUSE | 11 SEPTEMBER 2025 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
I spoke to her today. The woman who set the chain in motion. Unlocked the inner universe that lay unexplored for a decade, creative concepts and artistic impulses long-forgotten, yet still attached to my soul, my purpose, my dharma.
It was a cosmic collision of elemental forces as I entered 2022. Creative and geographic constriction during the Covid years had antagonized my larger-than-average need for freedom and autonomy, and I began meeting people who would synchronize with me on re-expanding that world. Enter, my muse. Impossible to describe, and terrifying to know her effect will never be replicated, she upended my practical, emotional, and mental worlds, as love - especially passionate, infatuated, uncontrollable love - does.
To think back to the creation of the music about to be released (Like The Night Itself), and the gravity it took to create it, is both astounding and exhausting. Yes I can create without such forces, but at what level do I want to be an artist? One who creates what he can create, or one who dives fully, deeply, terrifyingly into the most intense experiences of life, where true beauty inspires, and gut-wrenching moments leave universal voids for melody to flow in, all to be alchemized into an expressive form sharable on this plane. To create something that’s truly worth making from an existential standpoint - something that has undeniable heart, soul, experience, love, pain, beauty, sacrifice, adoration, loss, and all things human in it. That is what deserves to exist, and that is what I believe I made.
On the other side of this three-year arc, with the album coming up to release, I’m exhausted. I couldn’t do the same thing to myself again. I currently have no music in me, and a spirit in need of peace and a more calm beauty. But while I revel in this current quiet chapter, I do often think to myself; to express oneself fully, whether it be a great love or another form I’ve not found yet, a true muse may, in fact, be a vital necessity.
Image: The Nine Muses of Greek mythology
LIFE AS ART - WHY BEAUTY MATTERS | 9 SEPTEMBER 2025 | London, United Kingdom
I was 18-years-old, living in Boston, MA attending Berklee College of Music, paying more attention to the decor of my apartment, pressing of my clothes, fragrance on my girlfriend’s skin, the mysterious curation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the fascinating humans who seemed to magnetize my way. It may have been in me all along, but I began to develop a sense that all of life could be lived beautifully, or artfully at least. Ones speech, style, and the way an individual could flow with the universe, interacting with the arc of the sun and murmuration of society on any given day, could all fall into an aesthetically pleasing flow. Was this just aesthetics though, or something that touched upon a law more fundamentally human, even spiritual?
Later I would come across the documentary ‘Why Beauty Matters’, by the English philosopher Roger Scruton. While the delivery was painfully dry, it did validate and clearly articulate what I intuitively sensed back in Boston; that care in the design and refinement of all things in our physical world has a more profound effect than perhaps we collectively believe today. He implored that beauty addresses a universal human need, offering “consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy”, and plays a vital role in making life feel worthwhile. He laments in his conviction that modern society has abandoned beauty (I only agree in part), and has too often chosen utility over emotion or harmony (mostly agree), and that these increasingly-rare elements and aesthetic experiences lift us into "an illuminated sphere of contemplation.”
And so a lifetime later, having just completed the 3-year arc of an album made with such pure dedication to the artistry of a thing, I look for other ways to approach life in this artful manner. It’s something I seek to play with, interact with, test, push, and converse about, all in an attempt to create a life of richer substance; experientially, artistically, socially, and spiritually. To create a life that is a worthy masterpiece of quality and refinement in every layer, and every stroke. As imperfect a man as I am, I believe it’s a worthy North Star, curiously present since those formative contemplations in Boston.
Image: The Birth of Venus - Sandro Botticelli - Uffizi Galleries, Firenze, Italy
INTRODUCTION TO ESSAYS | 4 SEPTEMBER 2025 | PARIS, FRANCE
My grandfather a boat builder, mother a graphic designer, the legendary Dame Nelly Melba somewhere back in my bloodline, and all my early perspectives on the world presented through the lens of parallels; design to emotion, colour to sound, craftsmanship to soul.
The past three years have been focused on creating the most authentic human expression I’m capable of, with my most natural mediums, the guitar and sound design. But as the chapter of ‘Like The Night Itself’ concludes, and the album is released, I find myself enquiring again about the other 20% of my identity, curious of what else it needs to create. Almost like it’s an entity unto itself that needs to exhaust its creative capacity while alive on this earth.
Enter ‘Essays’, my gateway drug to these pursuits. Here I’ll discuss the concepts I speak with my friends about on a daily basis. The austere and overly puritanical views I have on beauty, aesthetic, and genuine artistry. You’ll see my fight myself on concepts, the way I bulletproof ideas, and be overly opinionated but still with room to be told I’m wrong.
Welcome to my inner monologue that never ceases. Subscribe on email if you’d like updates, or receive sporadic reposts on social media. I’m excited to see what it leads to, both in terms of creativity, connection, and collaboration … with gratitude to the wonderful Sara Mahouachi for the photos to signify this launch.
AUTHENTICITY & CLUB CLASSICS | 3 SEPTEMBER 2025 | PARIS, FRANCE
“Bad tattoos on leather-tanned skin, Jesus Christ on a plastic sign, winding roads doing manual drive, early nights in white sheets with lace curtains, Capri in the distance”. You may know the song, the album, or at the least 2024’s ubiquitous lime-green hue that represented Charli XCX’s Brat project, infiltrating music, fashion, and culture for the past year, down to the ‘Charli clones’ still spilling out at 4am in New York and Paris. But how did she have this impact? The writing is crude, as is the production. The mix is aggressive and the album art is horrific. Yet it moved culture, and for the record, I’m a fan too.
One evening, coincidentally driving a lime green Vespa along the Amalfi Coast’s winding roads (presumably those referred to in the above lyrics), I realized the answer lay in something fundamentally and powerfully human; authenticity. While I may only be at the beginnings of understanding the true explanation as to why such states are powerful (ref. Joe Dispenza), I have at least had enough life experience to recognize the undeniable power of this state. Things can be crude, broken, low quality even, but there is an undeniability and emotion that comes through any medium when it’s delivered from this deeply human place.
So as I contemplate future projects, with my proactive mind reaching into calculations on commercial viability of certain pursuits, I hope I hold onto this knowledge and work with it. Writing from the heart, playing from the heart, and communicating in all aspects of life with transparency, genuineness, and truth - authentically.
THE DEATH OF MONOCULTURE | HOW WE CONNECT | 31 AUGUST 2025 | PARIS, FRANCE
I’m a big believer in the value of beauty. How our surroundings instill in us the desire to coexist harmoniously. But beautifully or not, the connection in the first place is a fundamental necessity, and I fear that it’s being eroded at an astounding pace.
It’s making me concerned for the collective ‘us’. Less attendance of social & cultural events in general, in addition to the deluge of consumable art at a violent pace, entertainment and content, continuously more algorithmically targeted to the individual, separating us onto our own islands, with gradually less to connect over. Once upon a time we’d unite over monumental events; album releases, concert tours, universally impactful films, binding us together as a society through both serious, and trivial pieces alike. But with so much to choose from, tailored to our individual digital identities without our knowledge, are we all drifting apart? And what is the consequence of this drift?
In two weeks I’ll see Fred Again perform in Rome, Italy. One of the artists I can distinctly point to who is creating something that feels culturally inclusive and warm, inviting us into his global living room and reminding his audience of our humanity and connection. Those signature intimate voice-notes, presented with the grandeur they deserve as moments where the human heart shows, are almost a conceptually parallel to the placement of spiritual motifs in the context of a renaissance church. Honoring what deserves to be honored via context. And as for my own work, while I may not have a voice big enough to participate in any moment of monoculture, I can still reevaluate why I create anything at all; and choose to share an authentic human experience, hopefully igniting something beautiful in another human being.
CHANCE DOESN’T EXIST | 29 AUGUST 2025 | PARIS, FRANCE
An unscripted dialogue with Sidonie Bey (@pamlapam) & Seul Ciel Sait, added as the first visual addition to my new series of essays on art, life, and philosophy, featuring an excerpt of 'Pensieri' from my forthcoming album 'Like The Night Itself':