The Santa Fe Trail

The Santa Fe Trail, a compilation album, is now out on Bandcamp.

The Santa Fe Trail was created in the span of my travels west from Kansas City to Montana, where I spent time in Hardin, Billings, and Big Timber as a newspaper editor for the Big Horn County News & Big Timber Pioneer, and then down to Las Cruces and Chama, New Mexico, over the course of 5 years. This collection of music symbolizes the progression of my life as well as my writing and production skills. I started audio engineering at Emerald Dreams Lab in Kansas City, Missouri. I took the skills I learned from Emerald’s audio engineering course and proceeded to create hundreds of tracks scattered across different albums and EPs.

At first, I was a beginner audio engineer and producer. You can hear my raw talents and influences from my early 20s in songs like “Top of the Mountain” and “Soulless Monster,” where I reflect on my habits, death, love, my path, and feeling like I had a dark voice in my head. I was in a dark space, mostly confined to my dark room in my apartment, blackout curtains drawn over the windows, deep in meditation in my closet and recording songs in the early mornings.

Some of this collection was created during the dark, cold winter in Montana. The Tower & the Inferno is one of my earliest tracks, recorded in my spare bedroom in Hardin. Most of my beat tape called Chasing the Wind is also included in The Santa Fe Trail compilation. I produced it during the winter of 2022 in Billings as I was writing for the Big Timber Pioneer and exploring the Custer-Gallatin National Forest outside of Big Timber.

Other tracks are from a Soundcloud album I recorded in 2023 from the Organ Mountains in Las Cruces. I had fun hiking around the desert and listening to old 60s outlaw music, and those influences can be found on tracks like Hemingway. I was heavily into self-production during this time and experimented with different pop/rage/hip hop/trap genres. The Santa Fe Trail is me moving most of my discography from Soundcloud over to Bandcamp.

The final portion of The Santa Fe Trail was recorded from my cabin in the Brazos Mountains of remote northern New Mexico, Rio Arriba County, over the span of a year. I focused more on rapping for these tracks, like DuffGod Raps (produced by close friend and Duff Radio affiliate, Kansas City’s Gittyman), Mary’s Theme, and the two tracks from my Adobe Morning EP - Gemini Season/Forest Service Road 151 and Navajo Tacos, where I talk about the birth of my son, winter/springtime in the mountains, routine, and nature. I was influenced by C.S. Lewis and started writing exclusively with pen and paper during this time in my life, and these records coincide with Redwood - a poetry book I also wrote during my year in Brazos.

114 tracks, rap/experimental hip hop/self production. Contains all of my influences from the past 5 years.