I went to Berlin because I needed to not be here anymore.
The album — Can’t Wait Until Dark, 2008 through 2010 — broke something in me. Not the music itself. The music I still believe in. But the experience of making it was something else. Too many hands in the pot. Not enough trust in my vision. People who were supposed to be on my side making decisions I never agreed to, redirecting things I was supposed to be steering. I got used. I got exploited. I lost the thread of what I was even trying to make somewhere in the middle of it.
And this was 2008 to 2010. There was no Spotify. No Apple Music. I had Bandcamp. That was it. You put something out and it found people or it didn’t, and you didn’t always know which.
The record found some people. But I didn’t feel it that way at the time. What I felt was tired. Like I had handed something precious over to the wrong people and gotten it back in pieces.
My relationship with music ended after that. Not publicly — I didn’t announce anything. I just stopped. And then I left.
Berlin wasn’t a creative retreat. I want to be clear about that, because the way people talk about “going to Berlin” makes it sound intentional, like I had a plan. I didn’t. I had a fresh start and not much else. There were good moments — little glimmers, genuinely — but I wasn’t there to make music. I was there to get some distance from what making music had cost me.
I stayed close to eight years.
Coming back to Los Angeles, coming back to music — that wasn’t inevitable. I had to decide it. And deciding it meant being honest about what happened the first time, not just the version that sounds good in a press kit. That’s the whole story.
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