From Barns to Breezy
When I listen back to Burning Barns & Bridges, I can still smell the cornfields. There’s this dusty quiet that hangs over that whole album — the sound of someone trying to leave home but still looking over their shoulder. I wrote most of it in Watseka, in my grandparents’ living room, surrounded by creaking floors and the hum of the old fridge. You can hear it in the songs: that mix of tenderness and frustration, of wanting to run but not knowing where yet.
Those songs were my first map out of there. Burning Barns & Bridges was built on instinct. I didn’t know anything about production or arrangement — I just knew I had to tell those stories before I could move on. It was raw, mostly acoustic, almost diary-like. There’s a lot of hurt in that record, but also hope. Every song felt like striking a match in the dark.
Then came Chicago.
Moving to the city cracked something open. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who were all chasing something too — artists, bartenders, photographers, buskers, kids with notebooks full of dreams and unpaid rent. The city gave me new stories to tell, but also new sounds. The train brakes, the chatter in coffee shops, the bass bleeding through apartment walls — all that noise started sneaking into my songs.
That’s when From Bleachers To Breezy started taking shape.
If Burning Barns & Bridges was about escape, From Bleachers To Breezy was about arrival — messy, loud, and a little unsteady. I wanted to capture the energy of this new life: the first Chicago summers, the late-night walks, the heartbreak that doesn’t destroy you but reshapes you.
Sonically, the difference is night and day. The first album was all guitars, dust, and breath. Breezy brought in synths, beats, layers — thanks to NDM, who started producing with me around that time. He challenged me to think about space differently. “You can still be intimate,” he’d say, “but let’s see what happens when intimacy has a pulse.”
We’d record in his small Logan Square studio — windows open, street noise bleeding into the takes — and it became part of the sound. That’s how “Girl in the Bleachers” got its heartbeat rhythm, and why “First & Fifteens” feels like the city sighing between bills and dreams.
Lyrically, I loosened up. I stopped trying to make everything poetic and let more of my actual voice in — sarcasm, humor, little confessions. I started writing about what it felt like to be in my twenties: broke but free, heartbroken but hopeful, sitting on rooftops watching the city breathe.
What I learned between those two albums is that growth doesn’t mean letting go of where you came from — it means finding new ways to carry it. There are still echoes of Burning Barns & Bridges in From Bleachers To Breezy: the small-town kid still lives inside the city girl. But now, she’s louder. She knows how to stand her ground.
I used to write songs as survival. Now, I write them as connection — to this place, to the people who show up to shows, to anyone who hears a lyric and thinks, yeah, that’s me too.
“From Barns to Breezy” isn’t just an album transition — it’s who I became in between.