The Beginning

The Long Ride didn’t begin in a studio. It began nearly twenty years ago, in my living room in a handful of melodies, unfinished verses, and instrumental sketches I wrote between 2006 and 2009. I knew what the songs were about — restless hearts, haunted highways, the peculiar holiness of running toward something you’re not sure you deserve — but I didn’t yet have the means to bring them to life the way I heard them in my head.

And in my head? There was always a voice. I didn’t know her name back then, but I knew the sound: a little smoke, a little sky, a little grit that could bloom into something wild. I couldn’t find her in any singer I knew… and I certainly couldn’t perform her myself. So the songs sat. They waited. I waited.

And now...

Almost twenty years later, out of the dust and out of the blue, technology caught up to imagination. Suddenly I had access to production tools, musicians, and a voice model that could inhabit the exact spirit I’d been hearing all this time. That’s when Lyla Rae Hightower finally stepped out of the shadows — not invented, but revealed. The person I’d been writing for all along.

The music, melodies, and lyrics in The Long Ride are mine — anchored in who I was back then and reshaped by who I’ve become now. But the production, the instrumentation, the performance, and Lyla’s unmistakable voice are born from the new frontier of AI. It’s not meant to be a trick; it’s a collaboration across time. 2006-me and 2025-me finally working together with a singer who never existed until she suddenly did.

I'm still wrestling with all of it - because what has emerged isn’t just a mini-album. It’s a conversation between past and present me.
Between the human work I did long ago and the technology that let me finish the thought.

Between the songwriter I was and the storyteller I am now.

So yes, The Long Ride is my project — deeply, undeniably.

Because, honestly, it's been one.

And looking forward...

But it’s also a world I’m stepping into with the same sense of discovery as anyone who presses play. Lyla isn’t a fantasy; she’s the voice these songs were waiting for. And finally, I can hear them the way I always knew they were meant to sound.

If the album feels like a resurrection, that’s because it is. Some art waits. Some art insists. This one did both.