11/23/2025
I was remembering one night, when I was touring in Kyoto, my friend and I were walking back from the train station from a show I just performed.
I was carrying my guitar on my back and she wanted to stop by her friend's bar on the way to her house.
She started humming, I started singing along to it. I sat on the ground by a pillar, near a crosswalk, and started strumming. She started singing. I started singing. We sang "Volcano" by Damien Rice. A small crowd formed. We got some tips. I sold a couple extra CDs out of my guitar case.
We got up, continued to the bar, and next thing I knew, I started singing and strumming. I went on from 10pm to 6am. Five people stayed and listened for the entire time.
The way I gravitated back to the guitar, and singing, over and over in the night, after playing a concert, and then singing at the crosswalk, felt like the gravity that pulls one back into the arms of their lover, over and over again. It felt inevitable. It felt like surrender.
Before anything or anyone else, music was my first love, my greatest love. I've been singing since I was 3. The all-consuming feeling, doing something so natural to you, the animalistic, but refined feeling of art coming from the bare body, is a love I have never found in another person.
In knowing love like this, sometimes I feel blessed to have been born with an artist's soul. To live life in prismacolor. For the days to feel like dark chocolate and blood, compared to what I imagine a life without the lens of artistry, must feel like.