I was asked to expand on my post about my recent encounter with Felicia Day for NewMusicBox. The title of the piece is “Good Career Hunting: On Being a Deer Chaser.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

I experienced [a tipping point near miss] with my album Dennis Johnson: November. It was reviewed in publications around the world, including sources such as The Wire and Gramophone, we quickly sold out of the first two pressings, and it helped me get my first gigs in London and New York. The icing on the cake was making a large number of “best of” lists that year, including the #1 classical album of 2013 in Time Out New York. That in turn landed me a big award from my alma mater and an interview with Colorado Public Radio, among other things.

Yet nothing I’ve done since has been even close to that successful, and I’ve spent many hours since wondering what I might have done differently to make that less of a deer chaser moment and more of a tipping point.

If you’re wondering what I mean by “deer chaser,” well, you’ll just have to give it a read. 🙂

 or How Felicia Day Taught Me That I Was Wrong About Claire Chase

In August of last year, I wrote a series of four essays for NewMusicBox. The first post was (provocatively) titled, “You’re and Artist, Not an Entrepreneur,” and the series spun out from there. Writing those essays absolutely consumed me. If I wasn’t writing or editing, I was mining sources, reading opinions, watching talks, and mulling arguments. Seven thousand words later, I was finished, and I haven’t written a word on that or another other subject until now.

Despite the numerous conversations that spun out from those essays, I had no desire to re-enter the fray. I was content to sit on the sidelines and see how things played out (if I payed attention at all). Then a book came along that challenged my thinking and forced me to reconsider much of what I had written. It was the newly published memoir by Felicia Day, You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost).

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