My music is for the middle children of culture. We don't have a specific genre to fall easily into. We're not concerned with grand gestures and rhetoric. We're not mainstream, but we're not counter-culture. Our stories are the ones where change comes inch by excruciating inch. This music, and the questions it asks, is for all those people who feel like they don't fit in anywhere but their own skin. 5 years ago I wrote a song called "Firework". It's a guy explaining, albeit indirectly, a decision he's made to someone he deeply cares for. He's realized that he's spent years trying to be someone he's not and because of that, he has lashed out at those who love him. He is explosive, he is emotionally needy, he is this big awkward polar bear who wants love but lives out in the middle of nothing because that's just his nature. The decision he makes is to not change who he is for anyone ever again. He'll either find peace with himself and maybe with someone else being who he is, or he'll move on. And that was the beginning of writing Year of the Bear. The album moves like memories do. It's not in a perfectly linear order of events, but the moments jump out at you and make themselves heard fully, and then you jump to the next memory. Celebrations, disappointments, new corners to turn down. In the end, I would hope that people say my music didn't necessarily make them feel better, but it did make them feel stronger.