I have no clue what I’m doing, in case my incarceration didn’t make that obvious enough. By age six, I had started my quiet love affair with the piano, taking lessons from the old lady down the street. By eighteen, I was learning to walk in shackles, beginning a fourteen-year prison sentence. Somewhere in between these I had begun playing the same lifeless tune, beating the same ugly drum; I lived off of creations instead of creating. Eight years later, I am housed in a county jail where there were no opportunities to play music until last year when the school teacher downloaded a music production software for the inmates to use. My world went from one with no instruments to one with every sound in the known universe at my fingertips, scores of musical possibilities and ideas to explore - not just playing music, but creating it. But, go figure, I’m still learning as I go. As a music producer, I am self taught, by my desire to find beauty, even in prison, has always been there. 

It was in this spirit I created ‘A Winter Yard’ in late 2024. It began with a single image: standing beneath a frozen over east sky rimmed by razor wire fencing in the jails recreational yard, that feeling of looking up and watching snowflakes fall on my side of the fence. It is the most beautiful, most lovely feeling I know, and with this piece I think I maybe - just maybe - got it right.