The TikTok trend "the most important thing to me right now" has been running through my feed and it's one of those deceptively simple prompts that either produces a thirty-second fluff answer or, if you take it seriously, something real. I want to take it seriously. It's the day before Thanksgiving, the one holiday I actually like because it's just food and people you love and no mythology I have to untangle, and I'm sitting here with cold coffee and a notepad asking myself: what actually is the most important thing to me right now?
The answer surprised me a little, so let me work through it out loud. Because the thing I landed on isn't the record, exactly, and it isn't my audience, exactly, and it isn't any single relationship or goal. The thing I landed on is: honesty. Protecting the honesty that made all of it. And I want to explain what I mean by that because I think it matters, not just for me but for anyone making anything and trying to figure out what they're actually doing.
The Record and What It's Asking of Me
I've been working on this record for months now. I've talked about it in bits and pieces here, the tracking sessions that go until 2 a.m., the songs I'm wrestling with, the particular kind of focus that comes from being in a small studio space with a microphone and no audience, just you and the song and whether you're telling the truth.
What I haven't talked about as directly is how strange it is to make something this personal. I've been a songwriter for a long time but I've always been able to build a little distance into the work, a character, a metaphor, a story that was real but disguised enough that you could plausibly deny it was you. This record doesn't have that. The songs are about specific things I experienced, specific moments of belief and its loss, specific ways I was shaped and misshapen by the church I grew up in. There's a song I've been wrestling with for weeks. I get close to it and then flinch back. And the reason I keep flinching is because finishing it means saying something out loud that I've only ever said in my own head at 3 a.m. when the apartment is quiet and I'm honest with myself in a way I'm not always honest with the world.
Making the record honestly means finishing that song. It means not softening it, not finding a more comfortable metaphor, not letting the bridge resolve in a way that lets me or the listener off the hook. The important thing is the honesty. The record is just the vehicle. If I protect the honesty, the record takes care of itself. If I compromise the honesty to make it more palatable or more marketable or less vulnerable... what's the point? I could have made something much easier to make and much easier to release. I'm making this one instead. I have to respect that decision.
The People Who Find Themselves in the Songs
I've been posting about the music I'm making, nothing specific, just the process, the late nights, what it feels like to be in this creative season, and something has been happening in the comments and the DMs that I want to talk about because it's the most meaningful thing happening to me right now.
People are finding themselves in it before it's even finished. I'll post a voice memo clip, or describe what a song is about, or talk about the feeling I'm trying to capture, and I'll get messages from people who say: that's my story too. I was that kid in church. I had that experience. I've never heard anyone put words to the specific thing I felt when I realized I didn't believe anymore and I was terrified to tell anyone. The messages are sometimes short and sometimes long and sometimes they're just a single sentence and a cry-face emoji and somehow those are the ones that hit hardest.
This is the other part of what the most important thing means to me right now: those people. Not as an audience metric, not "engagement" or "reach," but as actual humans who are in the middle of something and the music is meeting them there. There is nothing more valuable to me as an artist than that. Nothing. Not a platform, not a stream count, not any version of success that is measured in numbers. When someone tells me that something I made helped them feel less alone in their own experience, that's the whole deal. That's why I do this. If I get that result for even a handful of people with this record, I will have done what I set out to do.
But here's the thing: that only works if I'm actually honest. The moment I soften the work to protect myself, I also lose the ability to meet that person where they are. My protection becomes their abandonment. The willingness to be uncomfortable on the page, or in the vocal booth at 2 a.m., is not just personal bravery, it's the actual mechanism by which the music works for someone else. I can't separate them. So protecting the honesty is, in a weird way, protecting the people I most want to reach. Those things are the same thing.
Protecting the Honesty (What That Actually Looks Like)
Let me get specific, because "protecting the honesty" can sound abstract and high-minded. in practice, here's what it means for me right now.
It means not finishing a song before it's done. I've had moments in this process where I had enough of a song to have a functional finished track, verse, chorus, bridge, done, listenable, and I knew it wasn't actually finished because I hadn't gotten to the true center of the thing yet. The real thing I was trying to say was still buried under the metaphor I'd built around it. In those moments the temptation is to let the metaphor be the song. The metaphor is fine. The metaphor is good, actually. But it's not the truth yet. Protecting the honesty means going back in. Every time.
It means not letting this blog become a performance of who I want you to think I am. I write here the same way I write songs, starting with what I actually think, not with what I want my take to be. If I'm uncertain about something, I want to be uncertain on the page. If I changed my mind about something since the last time I posted, I want to say so. "Raw, sarcastic, warm underneath" is how I'd describe the voice, and what that means in practice is there's always something real underneath the bit, underneath the snark, underneath the confident take. The real thing is the important thing. The style is just how I deliver it.
It means being honest when I'm scared. I'm scared about this record. It's the most honest thing I've ever made and I don't know yet how it will be received. Some of what's in these songs is going to land hard on people who come from where I come from and some of those people are people I love. My aunt Deb is going to hear it eventually. She's not going to agree with all of it. She's going to call me and talk for fifteen minutes about her chickens first and then she's going to get quiet and say something that will make me cry and I don't know what that something will be and I think about it at 2 a.m. when I'm supposed to be working.
Gratitude, Straight Up
It's the day before Thanksgiving and I want to close with something I don't say enough: I am so genuinely grateful for the people who have been here for this. For the ones reading this blog and commenting and sending DMs and showing up at shows. For the ones who found the TikToks and stuck around for the longer pieces. For the ones who told me their stories and trusted me with them.
I make music in a closet-sized home studio in an apartment with a dying pothos named Lazarus and a neighbor's dog named Biscuit I borrow for emotional support. I am not a machine-backed artist with a label and a marketing team. I'm one person with a guitar named Sunday and an audio interface and a lot of feelings I've been trying to turn into songs. The fact that any of you are here for that, the fact that what I'm making is landing for anyone at all, is not something I take for granted.
The most important thing to me right now is making this record honestly, protecting the truth inside these songs, and being worthy of the people who've told me they're listening. That's a huge thing to try to be worthy of. I'm working on it every day.
Happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate. Happy Wednesday otherwise. I love you all harder than I know how to say.