My First Album

I've decided to do something I would have never expected five years ago: release an album next year. 

It's called Evolve. It's about my personal evolution in the last five or six years, especially since I started doing music. But it's also about how people evolve in life in general. Every song on it will have a theme of change, learning, growth, going down a different path, and peoples' own personal evolution. 

Five years ago, I quit professional freelance photography after twenty-eight years to go to school, become a counselor, and make music. I put my visual art capabilities away to focus on all that.

Fast forward to now. Much of that didn't work out. I realized counseling was the wrong path for me. It's extremely time consuming and expensive to get into, and very draining emotionally - both the education for it, and the work itself. 

I finally realized I didn't want to go through all that - and that I simply wanted to do things I enjoy. So I made the painful decision to walk away. I also put the brakes on a bachelor's degree in psychology that I'd been working on for over ten years, off and on. I'd lost interest in both the field and the curriculum. I also tried various freelance businesses, and discovered I'd come to hate freelancing.

I also went through the death of a sibling, and a breakup with my best friend of thirty-three years.

So it's been like putting my mind into a blender at top speed. Ouch. 

I've decided to go into music, get back to my visual artwork, like drawing, watercolors, graphic design, and videos, and do photography only as a hobby. I also want to get a bachelor's degree in the music business. I may finish the psychology degree too. Not ruling it out. 

So some things have "left the building," others have come back in a different capacity, and some things are new in comparison to everything else.

"Evolve" seemed like the perfect choice for a theme for an album. 

(Potential album cover, from a watercolor painting I did in 1996.)