COUNTRY SONGS. REAL LIFE.

I discovered music at sixteen, more or less by accident, when someone handed me a record I barely knew anything about: Abbey Road by the Beatles.

That was it. Something clicked. For the first time I remember thinking, Maybe I could do that too.

So I bought a cheap guitar and one of those books containing mysterious little diagrams supposedly explaining where your fingers were meant to go. Before long, I was playing with friends, forming bands and performing in wonderfully obscure clubs where, strictly speaking, I wasn't even old enough to be in the audience.

A few years later, I had successfully completed the first phase of my musical education: becoming a school dropout.

Eventually, as a young adult, I decided there might be some value in learning what I was actually doing. With no conventional academic path into music, I knocked on the door of the Université de Montréal and essentially asked: If I can prove I belong here, will you let me in?

Against what seemed like perfectly reasonable odds, they said yes.

I worked like hell, earned my place in the bachelor's program, and went on to spend years composing, directing musical ensembles and working on all kinds of musical projects. Music had gone from something I stumbled into as a teenager to a serious part of my life.

Then life did what life does. It wandered into the room, rearranged the furniture without asking, and my own writing gradually got pushed aside.

For a long time, I barely wrote at all.

Then, recently, I started again.

Apparently all those unwritten songs had been accumulating somewhere, because opening the door produced something closer to a flood than a gentle return. Songs started arriving one after another, and in a relatively short time I found myself writing more than I had in years.

This website is where that ongoing songwriting frenzy has ended up.

For the moment, at least.