“GLASSES”

JULY 2026

Lovelies,

Last month I collected every last bit of Muzi content into a single document for copyrighting.

(Sixteen months after going live is a good time to copyright something, right?)

I expected tedium — but also a welcome break from my thought-heavy work of March and April. 

But downloading, organizing, I couldn't help but read.

And reading, I couldn't help but notice: Everything was wrong.

Exercises lost their center. Paragraphs sat stale. Introductions created false expectations. 

This will never not fascinate me: You set out to make something great. You labor until it's perfect. A year later you see a hundred errors.

Like time is glasses. 

So I promptly rewrote the methodology. Or I should say, I essentialized it. The foundation is still there. My conviction that creativity is our natural state. My belief that creativity thrives when we resource ourselves for it — with inspiration, courage, discipline, rest, and connection. But every Mission got a soul search. Every Reflection got a haircut. 

My favorite project was "First Aid": tools for key moments of the creative process. I revised Start a New Project and Heal a Disappointment. Then I tried something new, Integrate Feedback. I went on an evening walk and thought about the 11pm text messages from artists devastated by a friend's response to a poem. I ate my lunch and remembered the eight rules I instituted to keep people safe during song workshopping.

I lay in bed and recalled reviews of my albums, advice from producers, vetoes from co-writers, compliments from listeners.

I decided, as I have decided many times before, that feedback is a crisis.

It's a disorientation. It's a dislocation. 

Even if it's positive. 

(Sometimes especially if it's positive.) 

Feedback splits our creative trajectory. It can knock us all the way over or it can send us with momentum toward our sparkling creative futures. What makes the difference is us: our ability to sort, process, and land, ultimately, on our own feedback for ourselves. 

With love,

For the Muzi-curious, your Rest Mission if you choose to accept it!

Make Soup

Balance the wildness of creativity.

Remi owns a one-man business making soup in Oakland, CA.

Every Thursday he sets up shop at the Berkeley Farmer’s Market: cloth draped over a folding table, mason jars stacked with bisques, creamy split peas, chunky leafy green stews.

At any given moment there are six people gathered at his stand. A few to buy soup. But the majority just to be near him. His presence of calm and openness is utterly magnetic.

This is a man who was born to make soup.

So you’d be surprised to discover Remi’s passion is not soup making at all. Remi’s passion is music.

“I make soup for the music,” he tells me in a rare quiet moment. “Music isn’t grounding. Music is… woo-weeee!!” He whistles and gestures towards the clouds. “But I get a couple root vegetables in my hands, I chop chop chop. It brings me down to earth and after a while I can go up there and write songs again.”

Creativity, bless its heart, is not a grounding activity. It is electric. It is ethereal. It’s a sort of wild, unbridled, expansive energy that unfolds only into more of itself. It’s never going to suggest we dial it back. It's never going to suggest a slow, deep breath.

Creativity will smile coyly and lure us ever further into its dreamy chaos.

It is more than tempting to ride higher and higher. It can be actually addictive. You see evidence of this in how happy yet depleted many artists find themselves to be.

So it’s on us: Every time we create, we must know the power of the forces we deal. We must acknowledge the other-worldly creatures we are when we pick up our paintbrushes and autoharps.

And then we must make a point to keep a foot in the physical world.

We do this for our very survival. However creative we are, we must balance it with the embodied. The nurtured. The reposed. We must give strong and consistent shout-outs to this adorable earthly form of our bodies.

We must MAKE SOUP.

Or yes, you can make an omelette. Or a cake. But seriously, make soup. Choose some vegetables, the rootier the better. Hold them in your hands. Smell them. Chop them. Lose yourself in the rhythms. The textures. The smells. The utter sensuality.

Don’t distract yourself with anything as you cook. Just this once, turn off the podcast, put down the phone. Just be with the all-five-senses smash of a show taking place right before you.

Use this Mission to bring yourself back to earth.

And then enjoy your bowl of soup as a thanksgiving for your body — that beautiful vessel for the creativity that will course through you again soon.

To do this and more Missions download Muzi for free in the Apple App Store

“PERFECT”

MAY 2026

Lovelies,

"Make yourself perfect, then write naturally."

Bruce looked around the table at a bunch of wide-eyed teenagers on the first day of Harvard Summer School, Creative Writing: Poetry.

"Alternately," he narrowed his eyes, "you could do what the rest of us do and just begin."

Even as we giggled I savored his words like sugar on my tongue: This attempt to disarm us. This invitation to consider ourselves poets, too.

This permission to be imperfect on the page.

But really I'd let myself be imperfect on the page for quite some time.

This week I'm back in my southern Maine hometown, going through deep bins of old possessions. Well it turns out everything in a bin is a piece of paper covered in words. Poems and short stories and creative nonfiction and first drafts of expository essays edited in red pen. Thirty journals that somehow missed my initial purging of hundreds of journals. Literally a thousand letters from various friends and teachers, implying I sent a thousand letters prior and another thousand after.

Most of all pages upon pages of loose leaf paper covered to the millimeter in my barely legible script — free writing too free even for binding.

Actually how have I had time to do anything in my life except write?

I'm not reading much of it. A letter, here. A paragraph of a story there. It's naive. It's a fever-pitch of drama. It's self-deprecating to the point of self-eliminating. It's in love with everything. But what enchants me is how messy it all is. Sentences trailing to nowhere. Three options for adjectives left hanging in a sentence, as if to let the paper, itself, decide.

Childhood: In every interaction I was eminently composed. In my writing I was chaos.

Which isn't to say I wasn't reaching for something. Every time I write, I'm an asymptote — ever closer.

But what I approach is not perfection. If I had to sum it up I'd call it meaning.

And at the end of this messy week in Maine I've come to suspect meaning is the messiest thing of all.

With all my love,

For my Muzis and the Muzi-curious! Please enjoy this newly revised Inspiration Mission!
 

Unsent Letter

Get creative ideas from the things you don't say.

So many things get left unsaid. We sense someone doesn’t want to hear us. Or we’re afraid to change how someone thinks of us. Or we recognize our feelings are irrational.

So our thoughts remain our own. Stowed in our cave of secret longings.

And oftentimes we are wise to stay quiet. Not every statement is constructive. Not every situation is safe for expression. Not every conversation we rehearse in the shower should actually happen.

But our unsaid words don’t just disappear. They remain, if only peripherally, in our awareness. They affect our self-perception and even the course of our lives.

And they have the power to play a huge role in our creativity.

Scan your past. Scan your present. Where have you turned the other cheek? Where have you stifled a scream? Where have you hidden an affection?

What aren't you saying?

Imagine each time you bit your tongue is an unsent letter. 

And then look at the fascinating trail of unsent letters that extends behind you. Is it not a straight line to your most fascinating content? Your most honest content? Your most compelling, relatable, incisive content?

Is it not immediate access to your heart? A clue to the mystery of what really matters to you? A brief history of what has truly affected you?

Is it not the eau de you?

What we’ve said is interesting. What we haven't said is intriguing.

In UNSENT LETTER you will harness the creative power of the unexpressed.

Write everything you thought, everything you felt. Pick words that are hot in your chest. Emotions you've tapered in service of another. Thoughts you've buried for the greater good. Statements too frayed for public consumption.

Be unabashed. Be outlandish. Stray from the facts if that’s what you feel. Be true only to what clamors up and out of you.

Use this Mission to discover a new source of creative fodder.

And delight in each bit of human truth just waiting to be alchemized with creativity.

To do this and more Missions download Muzi for free in the Apple App Store

“A TALE OF TWO NEWSLETTERS”

APRIL 2026

Lovelies,

A history of newsletters in two parts.

Part 1

For ten years I sent a newsletter with my music news.

It was boring, promotional, tedious for me and, I assume, for you.

Then four years ago I did the unexpected: I approached my computer and with a wildness reserved for art wrote exactly what I felt like writing. Thus was reborn my newsletter as a thing more worth reading: an ill-advised level of revealing narration of my creative life.

Part 2

Last year I created Muzi, a mobile app that helps you access greater creativity. Muzi needed a newsletter so I dutifully pulled one together. It was boring, promotional, tedious for me and, I assume, for you.

And I thought to myself, I know better! I promptly recalled my wildness and started writing the newsletter from the volatile, cringy, saucy small true things of my creative life.

Actually there's a Part 3

The better these two newsletters became, the more they side-eyed me with an obvious truth: THEY ARE THE SAME NEWSLETTER!

I consider this great psychological news! I'm cohesive!

And thank goodness. Because let's be honest. 1, No one needs to hear from me twice a month. 2, I have but one idea worth sharing per month. 3, I'm not over here trying to die of newsletters.

So!

Like freshwater rivers flowing into a salty, sparkly sea we arrive at MUZINGS, the new site of my creativity cogitations. You'll hear what's up in my creative life: music productions, songwriting, collaborations. You'll hear what's up in my Muzi life: creativity coaching, talks, app developments. Truly these things have never been separate – which reminds me of my most favorite creativity soapbox: EVERYTHING we do flows into the same creativity sea.

Incidentally, even as my newsletter looks a little different, I hope you'll keep doing what you've been doing... that is, writing me back.

I am so very happy to write to you all.