2021.

2021 was a hell of a year. Don’t ask me in what way I mean; the answer is gonna be “yes.”

I really can’t sit down and look back at all of the things that I’ve done over the year. I’m the kind of person that’s drawn to their work and has tunnel vision for it. It’s easy for me to complete the next thing and then be like, “Okay, what’s next?” I never saw any value behind looking back in retrospect. But in an effort to try to break out of the bounds I normally find myself in, here goes nothing.

I Don’t Wanna Doot My Own Horn, BUT!

I tweeted on New Year’s Eve that I did absolutely nothing this year and some really dear friends jumped into my replies with kind words. While I’m appreciative and grateful that there are people like my friends in my corner, the tone of that tweet was meant to be facetious. I know what I did this year, and I’d be a fool to truly believe that I didn’t do anything.

I genuinely never thought that I’d look this happy with a trumpet in my hand. Thanks, Loren Wohl and Lemon Poppy Studios!

For starters, I picked up the trumpet and started playing again in a time where I didn’t see myself doing so ever again.

I started tele-counseling in the latter part of 2020. The existential dread behind the COVID-19 Panasonic was starting to be a little overbearing, but with the help of my counselor I managed to hop out of that funk pretty quickly. But after I found peace with where the pandemic put me, we decided to tackle things in my past that I really didn’t process, and the surprising result was finding out how it affected so much of my current decisions — one of those decisions being why I never picked the trumpet up after years of playing.

I could get into more detail about the events and the present’s nuances, but allow me this moment to be a little vain. That’s a chapter for a best-selling memoir or a juicy moment for a tell-all TV interview. It ain’t for a blog post. So let’s just leave it at this: although I still have remnants of anxiety when I do play, I started the most difficult step behind being truly at peace with the worst parts of what I love doing.

And oh, the things I did once I picked it back up! The competition for the Biggest Flex of 2021™ has a lot of competitors and the trophy for first place has to be split between two things. What happened first was recording, mixing, and mastering a big band album smack dab in the middle of the pandemic. I started working on arrangements for this big band called the Red Line Arsenal in 2019, and I decided it was time to take preparatory steps toward hitting the ground running once the COVID-19 Pon de Replay got under enough control.

I’ve yet to find something that gives me a feeling akin to doing work in a studio, but how the album came to fruition (and completion) is something I hope I’ll never have to do again.

The album was recorded back when every indoor establishment in NYC had reduced capacities, so there was absolutely no way for me to put 16 people in a recording studio and go nuts. I had to plan and record everything section by section. That’s almost five times the amount of studio time than it would normally take to record an album of its ilk, and the expenses paid to make the album were far beyond the margins of my initial budget.

But despite all this, I’m absolutely thankful that I can grab 16 musicians that all believe in me and the music that I wanted to make and I’m proud of what came from it. Now, in terms of when you’ll get to hear the album, it’s coming in 2022. I’ll (hopefully) start making announcements about it soon! Here’s to many more albums in the future — hopefully all of the other ones won’t be done in the same manner as my first one was.

The second contender also involves the Red Line Arsenal. The band had its first show in December, but here’s another way to look at it: I led my first show in NYC.

I had been playing gigs around NYC on a fairly regular basis for the entire time I’ve lived on the east coast. I’ve done Off-Off Broadway plays, Off-Broadway musicals, original cast recordings, anime conventions, and plenty of other gigs as a sideman. When you’re doing all of those things, taking the leap from doing shows as a sideman to doing one show as a bandleader seems like a relatively small jump. But in the eyes of the people that don’t live or play in that scene, having your own show in NYC sounds like damn near everything and the kitchen sink.

And you know what? It is. If I were to look at the bigger picture and tell that bum-ass kid from the Texas sticks that they’d be doing shows of their own with their big band in a city like NYC, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’d call them crazy. This opportunity was something far beyond my dreams as a high school kid. And here’s hoping that I get to play with Mister Insaneintherainmusic one more time before my music career is over. I’m still silently squeeing over the fact that I got to play with him. My journey with the Red Line Arsenal is far from over, and I can’t wait to see what lies ahead.

Another thing that excites me when I think about it is that I got to record trumpet for a F*****G VIDEO GAME! I went to Manhattan School of Music for a degree in jazz composition because I wanted to up my compositional arsenal with the intention of writing music for video games, so achieving any goal involving playing a part in a game’s creation means the world to me even though I don’t do the world’s greatest job at expressing it sometimes. The truth of the matter is that I’m still over the moon about it!

The song that I play on got premiered during a charity stream led by The Completionist and I managed to clip it! The video with official audio found its way to the internet somewhere but now it’s gone. But fret not, you can hear me and what all this buzz is about when the game comes out on Steam and the Nintendo Switch.

Wait… people… will hear me… me… when they play Renaine… on the NINTENDO SWITCH?! I wish you could see the moment of realization on my face when I typed out that thought. I’m forever grateful to have known Mason Lieberman, and I’m still thankful that he let this opportunity come my way. Here’s to many more collaborations!

And in speaking of collaborations, 2021 was chock full of them. I got to record a lot of trumpet parts for not only my good friend Sapphire, but also for DiscoCactus for their brand new album! I couldn’t be more grateful to make music with the people I have the pleasure of knowing. And let’s not forget the trio stream I did with Dom Palombi and Ryan Slatko either!

Livestream Shenanigans

Ever since I had my musical awakening through FINAL FANTASY XIII, it’s been a personal goal of mine to play through all of the mainline games. And in June, I decided there was no better time to start that journey. So on June 24th, I started my Final Fantasy journey… and also my Twitch journey. I bought my copy of Final Fantasy Origins, fired up my PS1 emulator, and the rest is history.

And in under a month, I became a Twitch Affiliate. What really surprised me about qualifying to become a Twitch Affiliate was the fact that I gained 50 followers and retained a big enough viewership while I was playing the games I was playing. I would assume that turn-based RPG’s as a whole don’t garner a lot of viewership because the nature of the game is so repetitive with all the random encounters between story points. And truth be told, it still kind of baffles me. But I’m forever grateful that so many people stuck around to see me play FINAL FANTASY I. And not only that, they stuck around to see me beat Final Fantasy I. And Final Fantasy II. And Final Fantasy III. And Final Fantasy IV.

I started a gaming channel so I could post VODs of my streams, but I figured it’d be cool to make episodic Let’s Play videos out of all of them. I’m still trying to figure out the formula, but uploads to the gaming channel are coming this year. I promise!

Learning Lessons

I think the hugest lesson that I’ve learned is a simple phrase: “All you can do is all you can do.” That simple phrase humbled the ever-living shit out of me for the entire year because I always found myself in situations where I wasn’t happy with what was in front of me, and I always thought the solution was to buckle down and chop away at it until it got better. Surprise: it didn’t.

The COVID-19 Panasonic was a catalyst for a lot of things to change, so much so that it often felt like everything was changing with nothing staying the same. I tried so hard to hold on to things in an effort to keep some kind of equilibrium, but doing so just left me in a constant state of depression. The phrase “all you can do is all you can do” did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to reminding me that sometimes holding on to something does a lot more damage that letting go will.

I could only accomplish what I did in 2021 by accepting that I wasn’t who I used to be and that things weren’t the way they were. I could only accomplish what I did by moving on and being in the moment when I needed to be. The other thing that I needed to realize was that even though I’m learning to gradually move on, nothing is stopping me from striving to be better and improve.

I wouldn’t be the first person to answer “I don’t know” when asked about the state of 2022. But I’m happy to be experiencing another year with the people I surrounded myself with… provided The Being on the Second Floor™ doesn’t have any other plans for me. Whatever we go through, may we all find solace in the fact that we’re not the only ones dealing with it.

— Khrys