I know I was put on the planet to compose.

Everything else exists to protect that.

I grew up in Nashville, where home wasn’t safe and a guitar was. Sports made me fast until a broken leg and a tumor put me in bed with a nylon-string. I came out of that bed writing songs.

Curiosity took me into rooms I had no business being in — the MIT Media Lab, an Apple corporate floor, a classical label that needed its metadata fixed. I kept ending up wherever the systems behind the music were broken, and I kept trying to fix them. Some of it worked. Some of it ended in Chapter 11. All of it stripped the problem down to the same three words: identify, attribute, pay.

Along the way, I helped build music-data and rights infrastructure at OpenPlay, working with labels, publishers, metadata, and the systems behind how music moves.

That’s what I build now. I’m building ONCE full time, composing every morning, and selectively helping other teams solve difficult product and technology problems. I run, I write in public, and I ship.

In short, I put the poser in composer; and build solutions for the real ones.