The voice stops when we stop feeling safe. It shrinks when we've learned — somewhere, somehow — that being fully heard is dangerous. The work of getting it back isn't just technical. It's personal. It's sometimes uncomfortable. And it is, without question, worth it.

I built this for the person who has something to say and hasn't found a safe enough place to say it yet.

I know what that feels like. I was that person.

I moved to New York City, and quickly fell into a marriage that felt, more and more, like a boat sailing further and further from a shore I desperately wanted to reach. When that marriage ended, I was left standing in a windowless, basement apartment feeling like I had just arrived — overwhelmed all over again, starting from nothing.

I knew I needed something. I didn't know exactly what. I paced in circles and thought: find a therapist, find a voice teacher, or buy a plane ticket back to Indianapolis.

I threw a hail mary. I found Nanette Natal on Craigslist. I called her. I scheduled a session for the following week.

That phone call changed everything.

But the foundation had been laid long before that basement apartment. Long before New York. It was laid in Indiana — in a classroom where, every time the door opened, the whole history of the music walked in with it.

My foundation was built by two teachers who could not have been more different from each other — and who gave me, between them, everything.

At Indiana University I studied with David Baker — NEA Jazz Master, Kennedy Center Living Jazz Legend, and the man who built one of the great jazz programs in America from the ground up. He grew up in Indianapolis, on Indiana Avenue, in the same city where I grew up. When he walked into a room, the music walked in with him. Every session felt like being in the presence of everyone I had spent my childhood listening to alone in my bedroom — Sarah, Ella, Billie, Carmen— suddenly made flesh, made approachable, made mine. Baker had a gift for drawing the through lines: between what was done and what is being done, between the history of the music and the living practice of it.

He taught me that finding those common threads doesn't diminish the music — it unlocks it. It brings it down from the stratosphere and puts it in your hands. It gives you a place to stand inside it. And once you can find yourself inside the music, you know you can create something too. He gave the music a job in my life. He gave me purpose.

Then I moved to New York, and I found Nanette Natal.

Nanette is a jazz vocalist and teacher whose work lives at the intersection of technique, artistry, and what she calls ‘the inner life of the singer’. I studied with her for thirteen years. I came to her first lesson a wreck — in the middle of a divorce, terrified to open my mouth, unable to sit in a room with other musicians without freezing, carrying performance anxiety so severe I couldn't audition, couldn't introduce myself, couldn't begin. I had only ever sung in school, a little in church, and to the posters in my bedroom. I “tried to sing”. I did not know yet that I was a Singer.

What Nanette understood — and what she taught me — is that the voice doesn't need to sound “pretty” ; that is not the job of a singer. the voice needs to sound true. True to you, and true to the story of the song. She called her approach Elements of Style: a way of coming to a song so that your choices determine it, not the weight of every version that came before. We talked, sometimes more than I sang. We did shadow work. I learned that the inside of me had to be safe before the outside of me could do the work of art. She was not a therapist and never claimed to be. But thirteen years with her was the most transformative education I have ever received — because she understood that the voice is not separate from the person using it.

I could not free the voice without freeing the person first.

I carry both of them into every room.

One month after I found Nanette, I had my first residency. A little decimated restaurant on Dyer Avenue, couple blocks from Madison Square Garden, with a bartender who doubled as the entire front of house staff and a band that didn't have time to rehearse. I had no idea what I was doing. When I couldn't hit a note, I changed it. When I didn't like where the piano was going, I changed what I was doing — and eventually, the piano started following me. So did the drummer. We figured it out together in real time, in front of whoever wandered down from the high-rise apartments above us.

After six months, they had to hire a server. Friends came from all over Manhattan. The place started making money again. I got to sing — really sing, the way I wanted to. And people listened. I haven't stopped since.

From there, the education continued — just not in classrooms.

I spent years working my way through the New York music scene the way most musicians do: residencies in restaurants and dive bars, learning the room, learning to lead a band without a rehearsal, learning what it means to hold a stage. In the Brooklyn neighborhood of Gowanus, I met Ahmed Gallab — tall, regal, quiet; knew everything about music. I didn't know then that he would become my closest collaborator, my best friend, or that I would eventually dance at his wedding and co-write an album with him.

Under his project, Sinkane, I toured internationally, sang on stages in front of thousands of people, and learned the hardest lesson of my career: that you cannot be afraid to use your voice. Not just to sing. To lead. To take space. To start the conversation and hold it, to make them listen. To you, to themselves, to each other.

That is the job. Everything else comes after.

I wasn't ready for it. My insecurities came with me on every tour date. I felt out of my depth in rehearsals, underwater at soundchecks — but then the lights came up and something would just click. People responded. I really did it! However, offstage I was depleted, lonely, lost.

Eventually I lost the gig. I lost my apartment. I ended up in Hawaii, waiting tables at a hotel in a remote jungle town on the east side of Maui. I was running three miles every morning, writing fragments of thoughts into my notes app at night, listening while gecko lizards scratched across the ceiling.

It was there — in the quiet, with nowhere to be and nothing to prove — that I started to understand what had gone wrong. And what I needed to become.

I came back to New York. I found a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush and a job at the 55 Bar, an eighty-five year old institution in the heart of Greenwich Village. I poured drinks in a twelve-table basement next door to Stonewall and watched masters at work — Ravi Coltrane, Ben Monder, Mike and Leni Stern, night after night. I started another residency. I kept singing. I kept learning.

Aggressive vulnerability. Work until failure. Take space unapologetically. Those aren't just things I believe — they are things I learned the hard way, on stages and in jungles and in basement bars. They are what I bring into every session.

Eventually I stopped waiting for someone to put me in a show and started producing my own. Under the Influence is a concert series built on a simple idea: take the songs of one artist and perform them completely our way. Not a tribute. Not a jukebox. A deep listening — a reinterpretation.

The first show sold out. As did the second. The venues grew in size. I was my own street team, hanging posters after bartending shifts, doing the math on ticket sales in my head. The third came after pandemic, when I had relocated from New York to a tiny beach town outside of Los Angeles.

This show was bigger. This was at Brooklyn Bowl, with Marvin Gaye as the ‘Influence’ and the late Casey Benjamin — two-time Grammy winner, one of the most singular musicians of his generation — as musical director. I planned and booked the entire thing from an apartment on the edge of California with a clear vision and no money.

What those shows taught me is what I now teach: when you root yourself in a decision and a purpose, the doors unlock. You just have to keep turning knobs until you find them.

If you're reading this, something brought you here. That decision — that small turn of a knob — is already the beginning. All you have to do now is trust it. Trust yourself. Your voice is already in there, waiting behind one of those doors. Waiting for you to step in and start the work.

Here's what I know: The creativity is there, inside of you. It wants to live and breathe outside of you. What you can actually change, what you are in control of — is the resistance.

That's what we work on together.