Why I Do This. Still.

ON LES PAUL, A TRAILER PARK IN OHIO, and thirty-five years of not being able to imagine anything else

I grew up about a mile from Les Paul's childhood home in Waukesha, Wisconsin. I actually didn't know for a long time that the father of the electric guitar and inventor of multitrack recording was from this very same place, went to the same public school system… I didn’t really know it anyway, not in a way that meant anything to me at the time. But something was in the air there. Something got into me early that I didn't have a name for then… and wouldn't for years.

I just knew I loved music. I knew I loved the feeling of being around it, inside it, making it, and being close to other people making it. But there was no real legitimate professional music industry in Wisconsin to speak of, no obvious path forward, no one pointing toward a door I could walk through. So the feeling just sat there, unnamed, waiting.

Then in 1989, at nineteen years old, I walked into a recording studio for the first time.

The TRAILER PARK in Ohio

It was actually a school—The Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, Ohio—where I'd enrolled to study audio engineering. I had seen an ad in the back of a magazine and told my parents that’s what I wanted to do. I mean, by that point I’d already failed Music Appreciation class at the University of Wisconsin (that’s a longer story), so they were up for anything. They drove me to Ohio and back in the same day so that we could take a one-hour tour of the school—about 20 hours total in the car. But the very second I walked into that main control room at TRW, I knew I’d found home.

I remember it with a clarity that thirty-five years hasn't dimmed. The console. The monitors. The knobs and blinking lights. The way the room felt sealed off from the rest of the world, a contained space built entirely around the act of listening. I stood there and something just… settled. Clicked. Landed.

“This is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life.” I knew it the second I walked in.

I've been trying to honor that feeling ever since.

Learning by doing — before there was another way

By 1994, I was twenty-four and had started hearing about something called production music—libraries that licensed music for film, television, advertising. This was pre-internet. There was no forum to find, no YouTube tutorial, no Discord server or Reddit thread full of people comparing notes. There was an annual production music guide in Mix magazine and a stack of demo CDs. There were AOL chat rooms, but nothing of value happened there.

So I made some albums, packaged them up, and FedEx’d them to companies I'd found through whatever research I could piece together. I had no idea if it would go anywhere. I just thought: this seems like a real business, and I think I can make music for it.

That instinct—naive as it probably looked from the outside—turned out to be the foundation of everything in my life that would follow. Thirty years later, I have more than 10,000 songs earning royalties around the world. I’ve sold three previous catalogs to major publishers. My current catalog and company, The License Lab, is now in its fifteenth year and includes 600 albums across ten labels distributed globally by Universal Production Music.

None of that felt inevitable from where I was standing in 1994. It was just the next thing, pursued with as much care and seriousness as I could bring to it. And then the next thing after that.

What the feeling actually is

I'm turning 56 this year. I own a recording studio in Seattle—THUD. named after Kevin Gilbert’s insane solo record of the same name (Apple Music link)—and I still walk in most mornings with something close to the feeling I had in that Ohio control room. Not identical. Richer, probably, for everything that's happened in between. But recognizably the same.

I love studio life. I love artists. I love sounds and songs. I love the creation of music and the tools we use to make it and the history of everyone who figured this out before us. I love the inside jokes and the long sessions and the particular quality of silence in a well-treated room. I love that the man who invented multitrack recording grew up a mile from where I did, and that I only understood what that meant once I'd already given my life to this.

That's not simple nostalgia. I'm not romanticizing a past I'm trying to hold onto. I'm describing something that is still, right now, the realest thing I know how to do.

Why any of this matters for you

After thirty-plus years in this business—building catalogs, running a label, making records, learning and relearning how this industry actually works—the conversations I find myself wanting to have are with people standing somewhere near where I stood in 1994. Or in 1990. People who feel the pull of this strongly enough to build something, but who could use a clear-eyed perspective on what they're building and why.

That's what my advisory work here is, at its core. Not a service. Not a transaction. A conversation between someone who has traveled a long way in this specific territory and someone who is still early in the journey… or in the middle of it, trying to recalibrate.

I can't give anyone that initial spark in the Chillicothe control room. That's yours to find. But I can help you think clearly about what comes after it. How to build something sustainable, how to avoid the mistakes that cost people (me!) years, how to stay oriented toward the long game when everything around you is pulling toward the short one.

That's why I do this. All of it. Still.