New Year, New Music!

Happy New Year, everyone!

With every new year, the same short-lived resolutions tend to re-emerge over and over again. January is the month of soon-to-be-cancelled gym memberships, quickly-fading fad diets, and brand new journals started with great intentions never to be completed

This year, my resolution is to chase my happiness.

Chasing happiness means a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, it's quite simple: to live healthier, to spend more time with those I love, to go on adventures, and to continue to pour my heart and soul into my work. Most importantly, it means coming back to music.

A few years ago, I was a very active musician. I put out regular content, played shows all the time, and never planned to slow down...but suddenly, I had to. My new YouTube content became rare (and then nonexistent), my gigs went from bi-weekly to monthly to pretty much annually, and I kind of just disappeared. At one point, one YouTube viewer thought I was dead lol (hi I'm very much alive). I get a lot of comments on YouTube/various social medias from people all over the world asking where the heck I went. Well, here's the answer:

I didn't plan on going to college, but I did. When I started college at 18, life happened in a very big way. Before I knew it, I was enrolled full-time in classes, which were expensive, so then I had to work multiple jobs to pay for my tuition. It became very difficult to keep up with gigs, YouTube content, writing, and recording, because for my entire collegiate career, spare time was nearly impossible to find.

The crazy thing about time is that it's actually the only limited commodity we have. People value money over everything else, but what they don't seem to realize is that you can always find more money, but you can't find more time. As all of these different aspects of my life started to take more and more time, I was able to spend less and less on music until it just fell to the wayside.

To be entirely honest, aside from having very busy days throughout college, I encountered many changes within my personal life. Some were great (such as falling in love with the most amazing guy I've ever met and getting an incredible full-time job), and some were really, really hard. Seriously, really hard. Unlike many other people I know, hardship actually makes it harder for me to be creative. It's kind of ironic - the same struggles that will eventually provide great inspiration for songs after their resolution tend to completely paralyze me as a writer.

So there I was, sorely missing making music but far too caught up in life to do so. It was a tough decision to make - stepping back from music - but it was one that I had to make at the time in order to preserve myself during such a hectic time.

I'm 23 now. I've lived a lot in the past few years. I've learned a lot. I've grown as a musician and as a human being in so many ways.

In 2018, I graduated with my bachelors and settled into a new phase of life. Many of the struggles I faced during my time as a student gradually simmered down and since have become inspiration for some of the most meaningful songs I've ever written.

So, now it's 2019. I've written a bunch of new songs, revisited a bunch of old ones, and am thrilled to finally be releasing them in an album called "Growing Up" this year! The album can be expected late-spring / early-summer, after which I'll be returning to YouTube and playing a whole slew of shows. I'm not announcing any dates/timeline as of yet because I want to make sure I take the time that this album deserves so that I can tell these stories in the best possible way that I can.

To everyone who stuck around while I was away, thanks for waiting. I'll see you guys really soon.

Happy New Year, everyone. I highly encourage you to chase your happiness this year, whatever that means!

xo

-Rachel