Why is primalbeet?

My First Album in Decades

2003. I am in my home office in an unnecessarily large house in suburban Atlanta. Outwardly successful. My kids are hanging in the room with me, the way they did back then — ambient presence, half-paying attention. I pick up my guitar and start playing. One of my kids looks up and says, Dad, put that thing down. You sound awful.

I question my life choices.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it. The kid is always in the room.

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I’ve been playing guitar since I was sixteen. Piano before that. Self-taught on both.

The longer version includes bands and theater. I wrote songs, did what you do when you’re young and free, and the guitar is the most important thing in the world. I wrote original music for a modernized Greek tragedy series, then for a children’s show. Learned more about economy and restraint than any other project before or since.

Nashville deserves its own telling, but not today. I went, I wrote, I sold a couple of songs, I was gaining traction in the way that makes you start to believe something real is happening.

Then life happened. The way it does, without memo or apology. Music became secondary. That was the “put that thing down, Dad” era.

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Six years ago I picked it up again in earnest. In the time since I’ve written dozens, probably hundreds of songs, most of which never saw the light of day. Because they were bad. Some weren’t.

I started putting things on YouTube. Original songs with videos I built around them. A series I called Porch Sessions, just me and an acoustic guitar doing covers. Dylan. Fleetwood Mac. Talking Heads. Bowie. Natalie Merchant. Zach Bryan. Asaf Avidan. All Them Witches. They’re still there. But YouTube is a drawer. I wanted the music somewhere people actually go looking for music.

Now it’s there.

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Seven songs. First album. Why Is primalbeet? — live on Spotify this week.

Here’s where they came from.

Whiskey Hurricane is about Ivy Lee Collier, a character from my novel First Light. I wrote the song at the same time I wrote her backstory. They arrived together, the prose and the lyric, which tells you something about how the work operates around here. Nothing stays in its lane for long.

Big Star I wrote sitting in a park in Roanoke Va., after a kerfuffle with a woman that technically never happened. We never pulled it together in any way. Didn’t matter. The kerfuffle had a life of its own.

The Lord Done Popped A Wheelie came from watching Uncle Baby Billy on Righteous Gemstones one night. Some songs take years. Some take the length of a television episode.

Peggy — a friend organizing a campfire night asked if I’d do a singalong. I wrote sea shanty: Nassau, a pirate captain named Beard, sixty guns into the bay, a woman worth going to war over, and a daughter named Anna at the end. It’s a complete story. This is what happens when you ask me for a singalong.

Mirror is my basic theory of life. What you believe is what you receive. Where your words go is what becomes so. What you look for is what you find. Simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker, deep enough that I’ve been living inside it for decades.

Steal is every failed relationship I have ever observed or been adjacent to. One party is always taking something the other isn’t offering. That’s the whole map.

Mother Ship — I am the mothership. I am where worlds collide. That one needs no further dressing.

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A word about how these get made, because you’ll hear the word AI and I want to be straight with you.

Everything begins with a lyric and an instrument. Guitar or keyboard, depending on the song. Before I open a single production tool I know what I want — the melody, the structure, the emotional temperature. From there I run the work through Udio and Suno for AI-assisted audio generation, then shape and edit in Audacity and Ableton. The process is iterative. It surprises me sometimes — throws a voice or a texture I didn’t plan for that’s better than what I had, and I keep it. That happens more than you’d think.

I know this puts the work in a complicated category for some people. Don’t much care. Blessed are the self-righteous, for they need not self-examine. I have been writing songs for forty years. I know the difference between making something and generating something. The lyrics are mine. The melodies are mine. The intention exists before I touch a tool. I wouldn’t release it if it wasn’t mine.

High-quality audio throughout, because anything less is an insult to the song.

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So: why is primalbeet?

You’ve been reading this page long enough to know I make things across a range of forms — essays, fiction, poetry, memoir, whatever the piece requires. The music was always part of that. It just spent some years in secondary position while life did what it does.

The kid in my home office told me I sounded awful. He wasn’t entirely wrong — I was still finding my way back into it, still rebuilding whatever muscle memory the years had softened. But I kept playing. Because the alternative was not playing, and that was never actually an option.

Seven songs on Spotify. More coming. Find your entry point — there’s a country anthem, a gospel satire, a folk-punk pirate ballad, some driving rock, a theory of existence or two. The range is intentional.

Go listen. Tell me what you find.

Here I am, playing “Peggy”.