Creativity, Meaning, and Self-Love with Andrew Pinkowitz

Welcome to the Ambiguous Truth. I'm your host, Anthony Mistretta. So this guest is someone I met at a show. He was actually opening for Ocula and a friend of mine in the Denver DJ community invited me to go to the show and I ended up connecting with someone before the show, not knowing he was about to perform, really not knowing anything about him and we ended up touching on a couple of topics that I thought were really interesting. So we grabbed coffee, dove a little bit deeper and naturally felt compelled to invite him onto the show and ask him some deep questions. I've had the opportunity to see him perform a couple of times and every time he knocks it out of the park, connects really well with the crowd. I think you'll come to realize that's purely a function of his empathy and humanitarianism. I'm excited to introduce our next guest, Andrew Pinkowitz. And with that, let's get on to the show.

Andrew, thank you so much for joining.

Thanks for inviting me.

Can you introduce yourself?

Sure. My name is Andrew Pinkowitz. I have a music project that is my last name, Pinkowitz. But really, that's always been part of my life, from when I was a kid and now into adulthood — I've been really kind of putting a lot of those dreams into reality. I also really enjoy cooking, really enjoy gardening. I have a bread business, an interest in kind of coding and technology and the man-meets-machine of where we're headed, which is a larger topic we can unpack. And I've always been kind of interested in those topics and weave them into a day-to-day basis. I'm also a dad. I am married to my beautiful wife Caroline, who we've been dating for close to a decade now, which is awesome to say. I have a wonderful son Eli who is close to two years old now. And I have a prince of a French bulldog, Neville, who is the de facto guardian and ruler of the household.

That was amazing. Thank you.

Thanks. Well, I'll just —

Touched on the real parts, right?

Yeah, that's beautiful.

We're to start with the most important part — I didn't know you had a Frenchie. I love puppies.

He's a puppy. He's a nine-year-old puppy.

Yeah, everyone that comes over — he's just a little spitfire, and they're like, "he's nine?"

I feel like there's a kind of continuum between terrier and bulldog with that breed, and we got like at least 70 to 80 percent terrier. So it's very fun, he's very active, there's — yeah.

I feel like the snorting around the house.

Yeah. Oh, it's weird — he's chill in the house, totally vibing. But then the moment he gets outside, there's so much stimulation all the time, he wants to take it all in.

Yeah, I mean, I understand that on a spiritual level — also, he yodels at other dogs? He doesn't bark, at all these other dogs we're like, are you good, dude?

But it's an effective strategy, I can't fault him for it.

That's hilarious.

It's his — we were trying so hard to train him to be chill, and then we just realized there was no stopping this, so we're just gonna embrace it. It's hard to train a dog's inherent nature — there's a way to moderate those natural traits within reason, and thankfully we've come to a common understanding, but Neville's gonna be Neville.

Yeah — you mentioned something about dreams and how you've made a point to make them a part of your day-to-day life. How have those dreams evolved and what are those dreams that you're exploring now?

Sure. That's a really good question. Well, I think there was one dream that I had — when we're talking about evolution in particular — like I was just looking up career-match things as a kid and looking for the highest-paying one and saying, I want it to be that. And at the time it was anesthesiologist. I wanted to be a doctor and an anesthesiologist because it was the highest-paying specialization. But then I remember I was touring —

I remember you talking about seeing pre-med students, and you and your mom saying, yeah, this is not for me. And then you found that smorgasbord of career options.

I guess so. It's not something I had a plan for — I've just kind of adapted to what was available over time. And I think I'm still figuring out how to channel the individual array of skills, but I'm happy to have the inventory.

And that's a fun way of approaching it — building up skills, building up things that interest you, that you're good at, and then figuring out how to create something from that, as opposed to choosing something.

Yeah, we were talking about how we kind of shape-shifted a lot in early life to adapt to what the need was, instead of asking ourselves what do we need. I think that's one of the fun parts about getting older — you learn more about yourself. Ideally, if you have a healthy relationship with your inner child and connect with that, you can have the confidence to pursue some of those things that maybe you were too timid to do before, when you were so focused on appearances.

100%. It's interesting hearing that pre-med anecdote — if you choose the med school path, it's going to beat you up. So you have to do it for the right reasons.

Yeah, and I have a kind of microcosm example too, of even within which discipline of business I wanted to study. I went into it just thinking, I really like the subject matter of the business management curriculum, and I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it, but I just want to study it. And then I had so many people go, it's got to be finance or accounting, finance or accounting, finance or accounting. So I tried accounting, and I didn't really like it. I tried financial consulting, a blend of finance and accounting. Wasn't a big fan. I got one of the lowest scores on a senior-level finance class, and I'm like, I don't get lowest scores — maybe I need to take the hint and just study what I want to study, because I can't force myself into this. So I went back to business management, and got departmental distinction because I really cared about what I was studying. And I think a lot of traditionally-minded folks only think well-trod paths are the way, and I'm kind of realizing it's a bit flipped — you have to make your own path a little bit, instead of accepting ones that are already laid out, because that's the only way to build something new and lasting. I've always had to temper my risk aversion a little bit, and embrace that "what if we try something new and it works" mindset.

Yeah, definitely — and we were talking about the germination of plants and planting seeds.

Yeah. From the plant that's right here to some of the ones that I have in my garden. So I actually got a bunch of seeds from this organization in Boulder — it's called Masa, Mutual Admiration Seed Association. And what they do is they grow regionally-adapted varieties of produce for the front range here in Colorado. So they kind of take on little personalities — much like us, they kind of enjoy a little bit of chill in the cold, relative to your standard thing you might find at a big box store. So there's this element of keeping the heirloom varieties alive, this Renaissance of heirloom seeds and grains, but also defying this trend of just consume, consume, consume. Maybe it's fun to produce and make. And for me, it gives me a sense of purpose, in addition to seeing the entire life cycle of this tiny little seed, specifically with these zucchini and squash plants — it became like a forest from these tiny little seeds. This is the kind of stuff you hear about in parables growing up, but I think everyone needs to see it play out to realize what a miracle it really is.

100%. How does nature play a role in your life, aside from planting things — but I think more importantly, how does that transition into the music that you create?

Yeah, well, I grew up in Texas, and it was very hot there. I love my family that's there, I love the food, but I didn't really love being outside in Texas. And I had this thought of, where can I find land that I really enjoy being outside? And when I was at SMU, we did an SMU-in-Taos program in Taos, New Mexico, and it was my first kind of taste of —

Yeah, it is really cool — I love that, and even in southern Colorado, in the US, that blend of desert meets alpine.

Yeah — no wonder Georgia O'Keeffe was so inspired by it, right? You just get these beautiful panoramas in the sky, and I loved the diversity of the climate, the temperature — when I sweat it would just evaporate really fast 'cause I'm at altitude. It was just this gut feeling that I do well in the mountains, and there was just this pull. And I remember at the time, my girlfriend — now my wife — Caroline, we were coming up on a lease renewal in Dallas, and we thought, if we don't try this now, we're never going to. So we just took the leap and have really enjoyed the choice. So when you ask about how it guides creativity — it's a sunset, it's the feeling of the sun on my skin, it's going on a trail and hearing the rustling of leaves, and maybe I even record it and put it in a track. It's just this endless fountain of inspiration that you can soak in, transform, adapt, and it helps you navigate when you feel stuck in many parts of life.

Yeah, going back to the whole plant thing — when you can see the growth and evolution of plants, trees, animals, the actual plate-shifting that creates the mountains themselves, you start to realize scale, how much bigger it is than you.

Definitely. It makes you feel this beautiful sense of meaninglessness. It also forces you to look at things as growth opportunities and forward-thinking, as opposed to reflecting back on whatever wounds you carry. So there's this interesting duality between the possible feeling of meaninglessness when you look at the vastness of the landscape, but also this maybe counter of meaningfulness you can pick up on. Like, I was doing a raft trip with my friends in Iceland recently — it's crazy I'm saying that, because that was a lifelong goal and I finally got to do it. Our guide, I believe her name was Nicole, was talking about how long it takes for the lichen on the rock to grow — centuries. And even the slightest touch from a human, the oils from our fingers, can clog it and prevent it from growing. And you see how much of it has persisted anyway, and how it's actually eroding lava rock to make soil, a fertile environment in which plants can grow. And you realize how connected everything is, and how you're a small piece, but you're still a piece — you have a role as someone who accelerates things that are not great with nature, or being a steward of it.

100%. It's meaningless in the sense that it's such a vast world we live in — small behavior seemingly doesn't have a large effect, but really, everything's connected.

Yeah, or there could be a butterfly-effect-level domino effect from a seemingly small choice.

Do you believe in the butterfly effect?

Absolutely — whether in its literal sense, or just the core lessons from it. We can see human intervention on nature and that domino-like effect. A lot of things have unintended consequences — it would be narrow-minded to think we know all of them in advance.

Yeah — so, before we hopped on and started recording, you were talking a little about the interview process, hopefully getting a new job.

Fingers crossed, yeah.

And how it's made you realize there are certain things about life where you just have to say, well, this maybe isn't the ideal way, but survival mode kicks in.

Yeah. I think that was something I struggled with a lot. I had a kind of sense of meaninglessness from the specific work I was doing, and I didn't really see any underlying purpose. Right after I became a dad, I did some therapy, and that was a central theme I'd never really unpacked — we talked about financial traumas from that book we were discussing, and I think there are career traumas too, that you've got to unpack over time.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

But even though it was a brief time with this therapist — remote sessions, while I was in the middle of crisis mode — she had some very insightful things I still carry with me. One was: maybe the purpose of this is that you can provide for your family, maybe the purpose is that you can do the other things you want to do — okay, you haven't integrated it yet, but there could be avenues that arise over time. That moved the framing from a sense of hopelessness to a sense of abundance and possibility. And it made me think, how am I currently integrating what lights me up, even on a small scale, in what I do? Because I can find little glimmers of it, and you've gotta pay the bills, you've gotta provide for your family, and we all have to survive.

So — that duality is a common motif I'll be exploring, and that's a perfect example of it.

A hundred percent. And it's the framing you choose — it's really being honest with yourself about how whatever this thing is ties into your values.

Yeah, exactly — and really knowing what your values are. A lot of people don't even know what they are.

Yeah, that's certainly a first step. I'll admit that's definitely something I've only recently really been trying to articulate.

Yeah, we hear as a kid, "what are your values," and you're like, whatever — but then you get older, get some gray hair, and you're like, what are they?

Yeah, I think it's a great exercise to think through that and write them down. But it's also important to recognize where you put your time — because that's really what illustrates your values. We talked about how that's the most valuable resource — we grow up thinking about money, but it's really time.

Dude, everything you said just aligns so perfectly with my path.

Yeah. I think it's a cool story — we were at that show, and there must have been some sort of energetic draw of some kind.

So it's fun to connect on that musical, energetic level, and then lead to a great conversation.

Yeah, 100%.

Are you a spiritual person?

I would say yes. My answer for that, for years and years, would've been no — but I think it's evolved into my version of it. Long story short, I've had exposure to a lot of spiritual and religious ways of thinking. I kept the parts that worked for me and left behind the ones that didn't. And now I have my own — let's call it spiritual humanism.

Can you define that?

Sure. There's the sense of interconnectedness we talked about — realizing both the small scale, and the butterfly effect you can have. Realizing you're part of something a bit larger than just you. There are lots of ways to define that — some people call that God, some call it other things. But when you stand in the middle of a huge ravine and see what a tiny speck you are, that concept's very illustrated. When you see a sunset that takes over the entire sky, it's apparent. I feel like I've tapped back into that. And the sense of having a son — I feel driven to leave him something better than what I had, on both the macro and micro scale, and I want to embody that through my actions. I think back to my dad, who was having conversations with the school board about overpasses in Plano, Texas — whenever he wanted to advocate for something, he would, and he didn't care if it upset people with traditional ways of thinking. I feel like that carried into me. I went on a huge tangent — I'm not sure I remember the core of the question — but how do I define it? I think it's focusing on preservation of the many beautiful things we have in front of us, and trying to better the core human situation, advocating for those types of micro and macro solutions.

Yeah, and feeling the emotional effect of those beautiful things as well.

Yeah, you have to feel deeply, otherwise you're not going to get it. I feel like there's this creative community I really identify with, of people who access that deep layer of feeling. I always connect with folks who are tuned in, so to speak.

Yeah, it's definitely something that draws me to creative folks because of that.

Rick Rubin, in The Creative Act, talks about quite a few things you've mentioned — one being, he tells a story of an artist he was working with who couldn't sing a song, and Rick Rubin said, "how about, instead of it being about a woman, think about God." The artist — I think it was Johnny Cash — said, "oh, I can do that," and sang it about God, and was able to — not a perfect illustration, but of the framing influencing the outcome. And I love that example, because the fact that someone wrote the song, but he did not write the song — by definition, it's up for interpretation what the meaning is. Maybe the songwriter had something in mind, but someone perceives it as about a woman, and it wasn't at all. And the listener — it's not saying a name, it's not saying anything, so there's no way for us to understand —

That's the beauty of good lyrics.

Yeah, I really like the ambiguity. In fact, I have a track called "Strategic Ambiguity" — a bit of a play on words, but it embraces that very aspect.

Totally.

And I think sometimes I'm almost hesitant to share the backgrounds behind tracks — I love the story behind it, so at the end of the day I'll always share it, but there may be some private piece — which Twyla Tharp, in her book, refers to as the "creative spine" of a piece — that can stay private, while you still share the story or theme as much as you wish to disclose. But I also like just asking, what did you perceive when you listened to this? And sometimes what I hear back is, "that's so cool, something I didn't even connect to is making you go to this place, or feel this way."

100%.

Yeah — and that all connects, because it stems from your emotional reaction. The emotions you feel when you listen to a song, or see a sunset, remind you of times you experienced that emotion. Good music is snapshots in time, and it can invoke emotion and remind you of something. For someone it might be a heartbreak, for others another form of loss, if it's a sad song, or for something more melodic and less lyrical, that's even more open to interpretation. The other part of the book he talks about is the artist's emotional connection to the world — in order to create, you have to have this deeper level of emotion, and capacity to notice things. How many people are just focused on what's directly in front of them and don't really look up over the course of their day.

I thought about that yesterday, staring at clouds, which I don't often do as an adult — how many people are focused on this fixed perspective and aren't even looking at a 360 view?

Tunnel vision — yeah, there's so much going on. That's kind of my approach to creativity — as much as I want to engage my left brain and make it logical, with systems and predictability, it's still hard for me to do that. At the end of the day, I have to capture the core energy as it arrives, otherwise it's gone. So I have this framework — when I feel it, just record it. I literally have a library of terrible singing on my phone, melody ideas that popped into my head while walking, traveling, or driving. Then it's like, okay, you've recorded it, now you have to bring it to fruition while the spark is still there, because if you wait too long it's going to go to a different place. That stuff is fleeting, you have to really capture it. Once you have the base of fundamentals, you don't need blocks in flow because you know the fundamentals — then it's just preserving it and staying in it until it gets to where it wants to be, which I think would be a very Rick Rubin way of thinking.

I haven't really thought about the creative concept being fleeting like that.

Yeah, big time. I almost have a sense of mourning for the weeks I haven't been making music — life happens, it's cyclical, but there are journal entries you'll never get back. Even if it's imperfect, it's about really capturing it, but there are always trade-offs with time, especially as responsibilities increase — you have to be really sharp with the time you have.

Yeah — so you mentioned you have these spurts of creativity spontaneously, and then you sing into your phone and record that — much like an antenna picking up a radio transmission sometimes.

There's this book — gosh, this is gonna bug me — "The Music Lesson" by Victor Wooten, the bass player. It really explores that concept on a spiritual level — I'd recommend it to all artists and musicians.

Do you have any idea what triggers that concept?

It all stems to feeling. I feel my heart flutter in a certain way when I listen to a piece that moves me, or I stop in my tracks taking in a beautiful skyline. It always comes down to that core feeling — and that relates to other disciplines too. The feeling of being out in my garden at 5am before everybody wakes up, seeing the dew on the leaves, looking at this thing I grew from seed, or making a meal for people and seeing them happy for something I cooked — very Italian way of thinking. It all stems down to: how did it move me?

Do you feel that typically, when you're in this creative mind and an idea spawns, you find yourself producing and creating music because there's a logical part of your brain saying, "alright, I want a creative moment" — or is it more that there's a rush of something driving you to create?

Both. It depends on the project. Sometimes you have to kickstart the creativity, like an old jalopy firing up — similar to when I've been speaking English for a while and I'm about to speak Spanish, I'll have a few misfires until I get back into the rhythm. Creativity is very much the same way — you have to be seated in the chair to get the idea, and you can't rely on inspiration all the time because it's fleeting. Now, granted, when it's there, and it's 1am and everyone's asleep and you can dedicate three hours to it — that's flow, right? You're surfing down the ocean and barely have to do any work. But sometimes you have to create the conditions for something to happen. One of my teachers, Camille, would say, just open up a plugin and explore, record everything, and you get a cool anchor or hook that evolves into the foundation of a track, and ultimately a song. So it's both — but then there are things like remixes with deadlines in two days, so it's either make something creative or miss the boat. Conan O'Brien has a quote about — even if you don't feel fully prepared, you make the leap to that boat, and maybe you bruise your chest and people have to drag you in and you make a complete ass of yourself, but you got in the boat.

Yeah.

And you can't wait on feeling prepared — you have to do it first and feel it later.

Yeah. There's a podcast I was listening to a while ago, about confidence — a woman CEO, I don't remember who — she was talking about confidence, and had a speaking engagement.

She'd been in a sort of typical housewife role and hated it, so she broke out and started a company — I don't remember which — and it grew, she was doing well. She had her first speaking engagement and was freaking out, felt like she lacked confidence. After the engagement she realized, "I'm confident in speaking" — but only after she'd actually done the thing. Confidence can't stem from preparation or anticipation — it's simply confidence from experience, from past action. You can have confidence around something you've executed well on.

Exactly. Right — that becomes the foundation, that foundation of successful acting in spite of the butterflies in your stomach.

Realizing, I can do this.

You made an allusion to your work, and you don't always like talking about the purpose or reason behind it — but do you have a few pieces where the context is so important for understanding the track, or so meaningful for how you created it, that you'd like to highlight and share?

When you say work, what are you referring to — music?

I'll leave you to interpret that as you wish.

Well, I'll be honest, because you were talking about motivation and work, and the first thing that came to mind was when I was an intern at a telecommunications company — my internship was, for eight hours a day, click a web form to order laptops for other people, then send an email saying you ordered them. Here's a list of 200, have fun. I thought, if I'm doing this for eight hours a day, I may not be sane by the end of it. So the only way I preserved some interest in it, and felt like it served a purpose for a larger piece of my career, was to learn how to automate the whole thing. I learned user-interface automation — every click, every aspect, how to embed variables. Once the laptop was ordered, it did all the clicks through this 30-panel internal page, then you'd type a keystroke and it drafted the entire email, preserving the variables from the script into the body of the message — all you had to do was press send. And the people I used to work for still use that program I wrote — close to 14 years ago now — to this day.

The Occam's razor of that is beautiful.

And I thought, okay, I have an uncanny ability to identify patterns and systems, so I need to structure how I survive around that edge. But as it relates to music, and needing to kickstart the creativity — there were times I was feeling something deeply and just needed to record something imperfect, then engage the left brain later. It became version after version, sculpting away until you have the end product. So I'm not sure if I answered your question — were you asking about emotion in music as well?

I appreciate you sharing — I think that was insightful. I was asking mostly — you mentioned you had a song written for your father.

Yeah, it's called "He's Still There," because I was seeing him in little ways — understanding the flawed, yet beautiful, person he was. It's weird, hearing my voice in these microphones, I hear my dad, in front of me, in the showroom at the Dallas World Trade Center. And so many times, his mom's still alive, and I'll call her, and she's like, "I think you're talking about Steve" — my son's middle name is Steven. You'll have to forgive me, I'm going to get emotional during this part.

But yeah, I just wanted to record a song about that theme — that even though he was taken away too soon, especially once he got really sick from an advanced form of Parkinson's, your spirit can resonate eternally, much like throwing a stone into a pond and watching the ripple continue. We talked about the butterfly effect — and I feel like a lot of the ways I show up in home life, in work, in pursuing creativity, in tenacity to challenge authority, even if it doesn't make me the most popular person, I can see so many aspects of him still there. So the entire purpose of that piece was to preserve that feeling. And you know what's crazy — this one will really get me going — there was a person who lost his mom and made a mix to honor her, and he included that track without knowing the background, just based on the feeling. It's not about the external stuff that might be energizing, it's about — there was something deep down that you couldn't put words to, but the music helped you access it. That's where it came from, writing it — it's this direct link between people that transcends situations, languages, shared experience. One day I'm not going to be here, so what's going to be left? Maybe there's a way for that to resonate with people when I'm long gone.

Very deep. Thank you for being vulnerable, I really appreciate you.

Oh, that's me, man — I don't have a poker face. I've tried playing poker, doesn't go great. Blackjack I can do, because I can react at liberty — blessing and a curse. But with that, I'm able to access things deeply.

And you really hit the nail on the head — music is this tool that lets you engage with other people and empathize with them.

Just whack the microphone like a baseball bat — we're getting some ASMR content.

Dude, there's so much — you could harvest a sample pack out of it.

I want to have fun with these mics — you know what I'm going to do, I'm recording a kitchen sample pack. I've been talking about doing it for years, and I'm codifying it — it'll be in this episode, released in a month or two.

Wait — what is a kitchen sample pack? You know what those are, for production?

I think it's a set of instrument samples you load onto a MIDI keyboard. I'm literally going to get my field recorder and drum on the myriad of equipment, pots and pans and tools, and make little rhythms and snippets that hopefully stand out, just because I have so many tools.

And then what you can do is slice little snippets of it — this is what excites me about producing: I won't skin the drum myself, I'll use available parts and adapt them, taking little snippets of loops and creating this gestalt thing. Blend it in with the one-shots and you create a really complicated groove, plays on rhythm.

Carve away little bits like a sculptor.

Gotcha — you create something bigger than the sum of its individual elements.

Totally. All right, back on track — were there any final thoughts on the emotion-in-music topic?

I think we covered the core ones — there was this other track called "Growth in the Dark." This is gonna sound silly, but I was roaming around my backyard really early one morning and saw this massive mushroom.

How big are we talking?

Maybe this big, overnight.

Yeah, you're good — banana for scale?

That's too niche a reference.

I don't think it is — I know my audience.

Okay, good. Anyway — where was I going? I don't know, I do think X-Files was in the backyard, there was a mushroom. Anyway, I was emotionally taken aback by it, and thought it was such a great metaphor — even in the middle of the night, it can just sprout up. It was an analogy for how we can all have silver linings to really difficult things we go through, and even if we can't see it in the moment, how it influences who we become — literally a metaphor for growing during dark times. There was this piano melody I'd been trying to iterate on for years, with elements of older projects that persisted — the idea didn't go away. And there was one point I was feeling sad, nostalgic, longing, melancholy, and didn't know how to express it, so I sat at that piano and kept recording it over and over — 80, 90 takes — until I had what I was feeling. That became the anchor the track was built on. I want to shout out to Dave Leck, a producer in Australia, who was so moved by it — I'd never even heard of this before — he created two different remixes for the track. One's an early-morning interpretation, more like something you'd play right at that time in Ibiza. The other's an introspective, piano-driven one, pretty much beatless — whenever I'm taking in a beautiful environment, I'll sometimes play that one, because he somehow brought out the essence of the track more than I could have pictured.

Wow. Have you talked to him?

Oh yeah, we talk all the time, we became friends.

Through that?

Through that, yeah — he sent me early cuts, and I'm like, this is some of the most amazing music I've ever heard.

Where is he in Australia?

Melbourne, I think, but I'm not sure.

That would be my guess — that's the one place in Australia I've been.

Oh, really?

They love their flat whites over there. I went to a coffee shop where I asked what the wifi was, and he said, "the username is flat white and the password is also flat white."

How long were you there? You've got a pretty good accent.

I was there for a week for work.

Maybe you can just repeat that one thing back.

I've practiced it a lot.

Very nice.

Yeah — so going back to the deeper theme, that was kind of where my head was at. Whoa, was that lightning?

It was indeed. Ominous, well-timed.

It really was — good timing for our conversation topic. Speaking of other artists using your music — Namer played some of it on Sirius?

Yeah — first of all, just for scale, what does that really mean, playing on Sirius XM?

Well, this was a radio station — right when XM came out, when I was in middle school. I know I'm dating myself, but I thought it was so cool — there was no radio where I could access electronic music, especially in Texas at the time, so it was the only way to hear non-stop mixes of electronic music before I'd even explored the genre.

So you're producing at this time — well, I had dreams of it. As a kid, I had FL Studio, making little loops, but I wasn't making arranged tracks. For a lot of my life it was a passive interest, and it switched to active interest when I had a pocket of time during COVID — it was another "I'm either going to try this and go all in, or it's never going to happen."

Got it — because the opportunity was there.

And then I never stopped. I've had this lifelong fascination with knobs and switches and how these things work.

Is that why you got into electronic rather than classical, given your piano background?

I learned piano to impress a girl.

So — what'd you play?

Bold choice — the theme from Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky, what a piece. I played a lot of that. "Mad World," the Gary Jules rendition. "Comptine d'un autre été" — I might be butchering the pronunciation, from the movie Amélie, by the French composer Yann Tiersen. So I've always flirted with classical music, but more neo-classical.

Got it.

Because there's still something about a piano piece — like this guy who just released on Anjunachill, Cephas Azariah — don't quote me on the spelling — his music's incredible. Just simple piano, cello, a few musical elements masterfully blended, that made my heart feel a certain way that a lot of music doesn't, and I just follow that feeling. Anjunachill is more their melodic stuff, they just launched it — Prof, if you're listening, hit me up, dog, he's the guy running the sub.

Yeah — anyway, so as a child you dreamt of producing —

Yeah.

And COVID is when you really started producing — so at what point did you hear yourself on the radio?

That goes back to childhood, in land cafes with my friends, XM blasting all the time, and I thought, it'd be really cool to get my own music played on this station. That seemed like a pie-in-the-sky dream, up until July 7th, 2025. During that COVID period, I worked with lots of music teachers, people I admired for different aspects — some approach it like scientists and technicians, others have this embedded sense of musicality, feeling rhythms and melodies without putting words to it. I felt like if I wanted to be so good you couldn't ignore it, I needed to learn from the people I looked up to, directly or indirectly — like Austin Kleon talks about in Steal Like an Artist, the pathways are there, you just have to analyze them and find your flavor. When you work with a great mentor, it's a force accelerator — I've been in my mentor Mike's program, the Nammers program, since 2020, five years straight. There have been music-industry questions along the way, candid discussions about how my music could improve, objective advice from someone well down the path — and ultimately being able to pay that forward later. I think that's what it's all about, how the whole thing survives. So — it was the lifelong childhood dream and years of practice — he asked if I had any unreleased music, I had a track that worked for the start of the mix, and I was blown away hearing that little intro moment right at the beginning. Shout out to Nez Fishplant, my friend and collaborator on that track. For it to be on All Day I Dream, a label capturing the organic-house vibe I've loved since 2019, the start of a mix, supported by my mentor, on a station I listened to as a kid, with my good friend closing the mix alongside me — it was major milestone after major milestone. And it's one of those things where you just take it in and savor the win.

Like a beautiful sunset.

Yeah, exactly — in my case, a lot of clouds, since that's the theme of the label — a cloud. So naturally — what's that effect where once you're aware of a concept, like if I say Volkswagen, you'll start seeing it everywhere — is it the recency effect?

It's something where, once you're aware of the concept, you're only going to see Volkswagens when you're driving, looking at cars — "there's a Volkswagen." I don't know why I fixated on that one today, but the example applies.

Maybe just because it's fun to say.

Yeah — the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion, or recency illusion.

Baader-Meinhof — I love perceptual gaps. I thought that was almost a sound effect on the soundboard.

I WD-40 this a lot, but — looks like you're going to need a little more, friend.

I don't think any amount of WD-40 is going to do anything.

Just soak it in like a bath of lubricant. I want to hear a bit about the organic-house genre — what is that? There are so many genres out there.

Yeah, okay. Well, we talked about this at the Ocula show, right?

I remember — we did, but briefly.

Yeah, we talked about melodic and organic and deep.

Yeah, those are the three.

Yes, exactly. So when I think organic house — granted, the genre is evolving, on Beatport it might sound more like what's classically defined as progressive house, so this is just my interpretation — but for me, it's the use of orchestral elements and real, analog instruments — cellos, violins, pianos, horns, real percussion like frame drums or taikos. Well, they're all real instruments, but let's call them traditional instruments used in a modern sense. And I like the darker shades of organic house — the melancholic, deeply emotional piano melodies. There's a movement with certain organic-house artists — I won't name names — that embraces a sense of chaos and randomness, and that's never resonated with me — I'm chasing the feeling, looking for the ones that evoke that sense. It's interesting — All Day I Dream has a sub-label called All Day I Dream in Waves. Even the cover art — the main label has a lighthearted sky blue, and this imprint has darker deep-sea images of a floating jellyfish, and the music stylistically diverges in an interesting way. Those darker shades are what really interest me — Draso, D-R-A-S-O, is the artist I champion most for this kind of sound, an architect based in Australia.

Right on — I learned about the nasally-ness too, I was corrected —

Well, not so much that, but I was trying to do an impression, and the guy at the winery said, you gotta add way more nasally.

Hey, I was able to make the tweak.

Where was I going — yeah, Drasso — he makes really emotional piano melodies, just three chords that strike you to your core. That's the kind of stuff I'm most interested in, as a micro-genre within the major one. Hope that answered your question, I could go on and on about this.

How much of your creation is really thinking through and understanding theory — how these chords fit together — versus experimentation on the piano, playing chords and figuring it out?

A healthy blend of the two. When I started, just with the piano in my room, I knew nothing about music theory — even after taking lessons, it didn't really land. It was stream-of-consciousness playing, hearing dissonance I couldn't accommodate for, never really getting the idea out. Then I started working with a buddy of mine from college who lives here too — his name's Will, shout out Will — on piano performance and music theory, and I learned a lot of those building blocks, so things I wanted to articulate, I now had a common language for. So sometimes it starts with, okay, I want three chords — an A-minor, a one-four-five progression — that logical, and I build from there, selecting which notes to play. On a track called "Play No Rain," I was watching this guy, Vibe Machine, who analyzes what makes pop songs stick, and he says chords are coordinates — spelled C-H-O-R-D-S — you pop them in, disable them, and they give you a roadmap for melodies to explore. So it can be that logical, or the total opposite, where I'm just feeling something, mashing on the keys, not knowing the key, just hitting record, playing with knobs and switches on the synthesizer. When you're deep in flow, 18 minutes into a recording with an analog synthesizer, you cannot recreate those moments — they're once-in-a-lifetime. Sometimes you get a beautiful gold nugget amongst that longer recording that becomes the foundation for something else. So the answer is D, all of the above.

Thank you for sharing. Out of curiosity, what's your equipment setup for production?

I have a studio at home, with this little rack of synthesizers.

How many do you have? Do you count MIDI controllers?

Let's see. I have only one proper analog synth, a Korg Minilogue XD, bought secondhand from my friend Chris. And a Roland Phantom G8 — a piano workstation with some synthesis capabilities, but I mainly use it to control other things, or play the piano directly — I've had that since high school, my mom got it for me as a birthday gift, and I've had releases with that thing, a fun callback to childhood. But I've got — gosh — eight MIDI controllers. It's a lot.

Why?

You can assign them to different things. I'd like to dabble in live sets one day — recreate the synthesizer on controller A, horns on controller B, live percussion on the Ableton Push, natively integrated with Ableton. It gives you a palette of individual elements you can control separately, without interfacing with the computer directly.

Yeah, for live stuff, I think it's a lot easier for you.

Yeah, probably a lot easier for recording too.

So if you're just getting into things, is all that necessary?

I'd say simple is best. Honestly, I had one tiny MIDI controller and a laptop for a lot of it, and was able to make stuff — if Lane 8 can make his album with a laptop and speakers, you'll be fine. All that other stuff is extra credit — it helps capture ideas, but plugins have come so far that, 80-20 rule, a lot of what's in the software as a baseline, with a few select additions, gets you a long way. You can go far with a tiny MIDI controller you buy for 20 bucks on Amazon, or even just your laptop keyboard. It's extra credit.

Yeah, fair — good to know.

Just in case. It may or may not be on the market for 20 synthesizers.

No, I just want something to keep in mind.

Fair enough. What was I going to say — you get access to unique ideas you wouldn't necessarily have interacting with software alone. We talked about the analog synthesizer and combining automation aspects — if you think about probability from a mathematical perspective, since I know you're a math guy — multiplying options by available letters, automation possibilities are endless when you think about the infinite number of combinations. So that frontiered access is exciting — the blend of the creative, the expressive, and the tech.

Yeah, exactly — the dance between left and right brain.

Yeah — that corpus callosum is strong, baby.

I think if there were one theme of the episode — drastically boiling it down — you've talked a lot about "D, all of the above," it's a blend of everything, not one or the other.

It's true, and I do it subconsciously, which is interesting. But you can't defy nature or who you are — you have to embrace it.

So what do you think your purpose is on this planet?

I'll quote my father-in-law on this one: to enjoy the passage of time.

You said that, I think, when we grabbed coffee — if not the first time.

Yeah — shout out, Dane.

That's an insightful quote, I think about it all the time.

Yeah — to enjoy the ride, and leave it a little better than I found it.

100%, and I feel like you have unique opportunities — still take time to rest and take care of yourself, but seize those opportunities when they come, because it's a short ride.

And it can be so fun.

Yeah, and you only get one shot at it, so might as well do the fun option.

I'd agree. Got to do what you have to do to survive, but look for the little pockets of fun along the way.

Do you think you've ever lost sight of that in your life?

Absolutely. When I was fresh out of college, I was focused on advancing in corporate America, and thought that would provide a source of meaning, but it didn't — it deepened a sense of losing sight of what I actually cared about. I've now accepted that work is work is work — you need it to survive, but as much as possible, integrating it with areas of interest is how you enjoy the time you put into it. Every job has terrible stuff, but it's — is there something you can enjoy? If you go a year and a half without a day you can really enjoy, maybe that's a wake-up call that it's time to change. So much of it is perspective, identifying the beauty in things, actually listening to yourself — a lot of our bodies tell us the signals early, but we just know we've got to survive, got to do what we have to do. Sometimes you've got to take a step back and listen to the actual signals.

Yeah.

No amount of framing should compensate for a horrible situation.

Yeah, much like a plant needs the right circumstances to grow — you need those surroundings, otherwise it could struggle.

Well, I think that's a great note to end on.

Fair enough. Thanks again for having me — it was a pleasure.

Thank you so much. I guess one final question, and some housekeeping — anything exciting coming up you want to share. But first: what's the best piece of advice you've ever received? I just like asking this.

That is a really tough one. Can I think about that one for a second?

Yeah.

My dad — I'm not sure I can distill it to just one, but he had this whole set of sayings. He was almost an Eagle Scout, so he'd always say "be prepared." But the one he said most: "always look out for diamonds in your own backyard." Taking that metaphor literally — actually finding a trove of diamonds under the surface of the grass — we have so many amazing things directly in front of us that are practically invisible. Before searching far and wide for something to fill a void, maybe it's right in front of you first — maybe it's adjusting your perspective to see the beauty that's already there. I think about that every day, and if I ever made a full-length artist album, I'd plan to title it that.

Thank you for sharing that. The only way he's going to stay alive is through me sharing as many stories of him as possible, and I'm the torchbearer of his journey.

Thank you for sharing. Do you feel like that weight fully falls on your shoulders, or is that something you want to carry?

It's tough, but I feel like, for the stories to be shared from my unique perspective — I'm an only child, kind of the only person who saw a lot of these aspects. A lot of people know him from early family life or work life, but they didn't see the full, dynamic spectrum of the man — much like holding a piece of light up to a crystal and seeing that display on the ceiling. He had many aspects to him, much like we all do. So yeah, I do feel there are elements only I'll be uniquely qualified to tell.

How do you feel like discovering this, from the perspective of a son, has affected you as the father of a boy?

Deeply. I see myself showing up with the same level of care, patience, love, and involvement that he did. He got sick when I was in high school, but man, we sure used the time before then — I had so many reference points of him being frankly ahead of his time as a dad, he really got it. He was in his late 30s, and he just wanted to be a dad. When I held Eli for the first time, it was a light switch — there's science to back this up, that your neurochemistry changes when men see their child for the first time. Women connect over that nine-month period, but for me it was instant. There's so much at the cellular level of your personality and spirit that you don't even have access to — you just hear yourself saying things he used to say. Same with my mom too — I'm a blend of both of them. It just becomes part of you, and you get to keep the elements that work and iterate on the ones that didn't, making your own signature, your own definition. To me, that's a really exciting thing.

Thank you for sharing that also.

Yeah, of course. Appreciate the depth.

If you could share any advice for people — myself included — who feel like they're going through, or have gone through, some of those same challenges around feeling emptiness, looking at work to solve a lot of problems, and trying to find more enjoyment, meaning, purpose, and creative outlets in life — what would you share?

Practice loving yourself — looking in the mirror, staring into your own eyes, and saying, "I love you," and your name. Like, "I love you, Anthony." You'd say that in the mirror, which is a deeply vulnerable thing to try — my music teacher encouraged me to do it, and I was like, I'm gonna try it. It was uncomfortable at the beginning, but I realized I was bullying myself more than anybody else was bullying me. I had to counter a lifetime of really dunking on myself. Another part of it is connecting with your inner child — print out a picture of yourself as a toddler or young child, and if you're about to be mean to yourself, ask, would you be mean to that kid? No. But there's also so much of the answer right in front of us, going back to diamonds in your own backyard — I found so much more enjoyment waking up in the mornings, reconnecting with the things that lit my flame as a kid. Some people are very in touch with that, others have some discovery to do on that front — but just follow the fun. When you asked me what is purpose —

> *Note: there's a gap in the raw recording/timestamps right around here — it jumps from about the 1:10 mark to 1:11, so a short stretch may be missing from the export.* >

Well, thank you so much, Andrew.

Thanks for having me.

Oh, I was going to say — anything exciting coming up? Any tour dates or shows, music that's coming — the SoundCloud link you sent me, the one at the 1:29 mark or whatever — when's that song coming out?

Yeah, in a few months — it's on the way.

Dude, when it came on, I was in the middle of a conversation with someone, and I just looked at them, looked at you, and was like, "see ya" — walked right over, I can't not dance. Music just takes over, right? You don't even remember what you were talking about.

So, yeah, I can't talk about it right now, but it should be out in a few months. And what I'm most excited about — not having any shows right now, but this narrow window of free time to refocus on production. I've got some remixes coming out on Ethereality — one of the guys I met in Iceland, Bjorn, it's his label, broadcasting out of Reykjavik. There's one with Shakira coming out, I believe this Friday. I'll share a few pictures of Iceland to look at while listening to that remix — get back to what's firing me up.

I was envisioning like a YouTube slideshow of images of Iceland — if you paired that with an organic-house mix, I feel like that would fit beautifully.

That's a really great idea, maybe a little collage — I'll think about that. You see the live sets that are out there —

What I want to do is a little circle set.

Yeah, circle a little bit.

Thank you. Iceland's really nice.

Yeah, there's like five circle sets, just on rotation. That was another thing, right during the pandemic — I was always popping those on, and that visual-plus-audio combination really did it for me.

Yeah, that kind of made me think — look at the possibilities with these kinds of things, what a beautiful thing you can make, tapping into the great scenery around you.

Yeah — I feel like we'll maybe end it with this: organic house music sounds better with the windows open, or outside.

Do you feel like, energetically, the natural environment engages with the music?

I think that's part of it — also just an acoustics thing, when the sound waves aren't bouncing around the walls, it can breathe. For some reason, it really suits the genre.

Interesting. So with that, you'll be bumping more music in your Subaru — you sent me the most hilarious text, "tell me you live in Denver without telling me you live in Denver" — rolled-down-windows-bumping-organic-house-in-my-Subaru will be a dead giveaway. I think you actually said "Subi."

I did say Subi, yeah.

Hank the Tank — that's the car's name?

Yeah, got him in 2018.

Has he been lifted?

No, but he's a Crosstrek with Falken Wildpeak tires.

Nice.

That'll do the job.

100%. Cool — well, thank you again.

My pleasure. See you later.