Came across this beautiful mural as I was walking through the Arts District on my way to check out some of this year's Nisei Week festivities (taking place through Aug. 18) in Little Tokyo. I love how the pink-hued lines bring energy to the piece, which sits outside of District Gallery at 740 East 3rd Street, reminiscent of the patterns that the Korean fan dancers create during their numbers.
At the EggSlut Truck In front of Handsome Coffee Roasters from noon- 4 p.m. Wed.-Thurs. & 9 a.m.-1 p.m. weekends 582 Mateo St., Los Angeles (Downtown Arts District)
"It was love at first bite," declares vocalist Charlie Cosser, as he recalls the first time a friend took him and his Charming Liars bandmates to EggSlut.
Since that day, the food truck has become such a frequent stop for the trio at the helm of the band – Charlie, guitarist Karnig Manoukian and bassist Mike Kruger – that most of EggSlut's staff knows them by name and even attends some of their shows. As soon as I meet them at the truck, which is parked in front of Handsome Coffee Roasters in the Downtown Arts District for the afternoon, the three musicians excitedly start describe each menu item, pointing out what they love most.
There's the Slut: pureed potato topped with a coddled egg, gray sea salt and chives served in a mason jar with toasted bread for dipping. Mike favors the sandwiches, like the popular Fairfax with scrambled eggs, caramelized onions, Tillamook Cheddar, Sriracha mayo and chives. He orders a Sausage, Egg and Cheese Sandwich while Charlie raves about the Avo Burger, a 1/3-pound patty topped with caramelized onions, cheddar, Haas Avocado and an over-easy egg on a brioche bun. Today he opts for the Scrambled Slut (slow scrambled eggs with chives on a piece of toasted French bread) without the toast but with a sausage patty and salad, and Karnig and I follow his lead with regular Scrambled Sluts.
We take a seat inside Handsome Coffee Roasters to wait for our food and talk about the Charming Liars' transition from their native London to Los Angeles, their New Disorder EP that released this week and upcoming adventures with guitarist Nick Krein and drummer Zach Riel as part of the Uproar Festival and a national tour with Sick Puppies. It just takes a few moments for me to discover that the guys share the same saucy humor that their favorite food truck displays through its own moniker and menu item names.
"We're all pretty cheeky chaps," replies Charlie when I ask which band member is the most charming liar. "We may tell little white lies here and there, but no outrageous lies."
"We have used the one that we were in Oasis," interjects Karnig.
"When people assume you're in a band from England, you could be anyone. Karnig has even gotten the Wanted," Charlie laughs.
Aside from their cheekiness, the Brits also share the year of 2011 as being a particularly monumental one with EggSlut. Head chef Alvin Cailan began the food truck that year, and business has been doing so well that he and his partner Jeff Vales will be opening their first brick-and-mortar location in Grand Central Market in the fall. Two thousand eleven was also when the three childhood friends made the leap from the UK to West Hollywood.
"Karnig and I initially came for less than a week. We were in a band in the UK that wasn't really doing anything at the time and were getting frustrated with the scene in London. There was a producer who had been messaging us over MySpace, and we thought, 'Let's go for five days, if anything happens when we meet we'll look into it further, and if not, we know that we gave it a shot,'" Charlie remembers. "We got a development deal, so we came back for another three months – at which point Mike came with us. We could only come for 90 days at a time with our tourist visas, so we would come for 90-day period, go back to London for a bit and then come back for another 90-day period. When we got our record deal we knew we had to get our visas and commit to permanently relocating to Los Angeles."
"When we first moved out here a friend had a sublet that just happened to be just off Sunset Boulevard," Mike recalls. "It just happened to be the luck of the draw that we ended up in West Hollywood, and it had everything we needed."
"None of us could drive at the time because in London you don't really need to drive, so we came out without licenses. West Hollywood was quite a convenient area because you could walk to most places, stumble home from a bar, do the grocery shopping at Trader Joe's – you had all those things close to you," adds Charlie.
"Finding our L.A., our little niche, took a couple of months. We found EggSlut, favorite restaurants, bars, shops and finally it felt like our little version of a city," tells Mike. "Before, we were just stuck in West Hollywood or going to places that friends recommended. You need to find your own loves and your own hangs."
"To me, that really happened when I finally got my driver's license," Charlie continues. "At that point I wanted to explore everywhere: Downtown, Silver Lake, Venice, there was a hit list of places I needed to go to. We love Venice and First Fridays on Abbot Kinney – the food trucks! Even though we've been here for a while now and we do officially live here, we still try to approach it as tourists. We're constantly exploring and excited about new spots."
Although Charlie and Mike live in Hollywood and Karnig remains in WeHo, they rehearse in Silver Lake and spend a lot of time in Little Tokyo and the Arts District where EggSlut parks, especially on Saturday mornings. After our food is delivered and I taste the rich and creamy scrambled eggs, it's easy to see how the three confessed foodies could be lured across town for a bite. Aside from EggSlut's brunch specials, such as pan-seared salmon and caramelized Brussels sprouts with a poached egg and Hollandaise or Thai marinated chicken, a sunny side up egg and grilled eggplant covered in sriracha butter sauce and chives over a bed of basmati rice, the Charming Liars share some of their other L.A. favorites.
"Oh my god, KokeKokko is the best. The chicken hearts," Karnig exclaims. "Shabu Shabu House, is also pretty special."
"There's a ramen place called Shin-Sen-Gumi that's really good, and we go there often," offers Charlie. "After we recorded our album, we hadn't played live in so long that we decided to book a bunch of gigs that were under the radar and no one would know about. The first one was at 2nd Street Jazz. We played to like three people then went and celebrated this incredible show [he chuckles] with ramen afterwards at Shin-Sen-Gumi."
"In London we don't get much Mexican food, so when we first came over here it was our introduction to L.A. Mexican food. There's a taco place in West Hollywood called Esquela that's really good," continues Charlie. " For food trucks, Kogi and the Grilled Cheese Truck. One of my other favorites is DinTaiFung, a dumpling house in Arcadia. I think it's the most satisfying meal there is to have."
After Mike chimes in with In-N-Out, Charlie replies, "It's once a month thing; we'll have rehearsal and on the way home go to In-N-Out. That's what I'm trying to find, the really good 24-hour, late-night food."
Aside from their passion for good food, the Charming Liars have always shared an obsession with music.
"Karnig and I have been going to school together since we were 9 and were in our first band together when we were 13. We met Mike when we were 15," Charlie recounts. "We were all playing sports, in school it was rugby, and at the age of 13 or 14 people started to get really big, and I didn't. I would get my ass kicked every Saturday on the field, so I needed a new hobby. Really quick, that turned into music."
"I needed to be obsessed with something. It was sport until I realized that I didn't have the natural talent that my favorite sports players did. Then I saw someone with a guitar one day and said, 'That looks like a hell of a lot of fun,'" Mike smiles. "We were all obsessed with music, whether it was songs, production or certain bands. These guys knew each other, but I didn't at the time, and we would end up going to the same shows."
"I was really into tennis and wanted to be a tennis player. Then my coach decided to move to Canada, and I was like, 'What do I do now,'" Karnig recalls. "If you like rock music, instantly you think I could play the drums, guitar, bass or sing."
"There's something accessible about falling in love with rock music and immediately wanting to start a band and thinking you can," Charlie agrees. "You don't even need to know who can play what, you decide before any of you can go get an instrument. Because I couldn't play an instrument, I automatically became the singer whether I could sing or not. So I'll be the singer, you be the bassist, you be the drummer – and then you've got a band, that's how some of the best bands start."
While Charlie remembers his first musical memories being of the pop variety – Michael Jackson, Usher and Backstreet Boys – at age 7, the three of them grew into pop punk and nu metal bands like System of a Down, Blink-182 and New Found Glory in their early teens.
"It wasn't easy to find new music," Karnig explains. "Your favorite rock bands were on the radio, on PureVolume or MySpace, that was it. The way to reach new bands wasn't as accessible as it is now."
"What I think played an integral part in all of our lives was this music video channel called Kerrang!, where all the bands would get their videos played. We would come home from school and put Kerrang! on; you would just live and die by the Kerrang! playlist," adds Mike. "You had to watch what they put on, so it opened your mind and introduced you to bands that you might not have given the time of day. You were opened up to music from different genres."
While the Charming Liars are undeniably a rock band, the producers that they were able to work with on the New Disorder EP and their upcoming debut album – Bob Rock (Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Nelly Furtado) and John Fields ( Switchfoot, Jimmy Eat World, Miley Cyrus) – are indicative of the group's respect for all musical genres. Working with such prolific producers might have seemed daunting at first, but they quickly found both men to be vital to the finished EP and album.
Mike confesses, "Before we went in and met them there was a lot going on in my head. I think we all were having—"
"Mental diarrhea," Karnig finishes.
"You question your ability and wonder if you're good enough, but what was great about both of those producers was the way that they nurtured us and brought our performances out in different ways. They're both really good at what they do, and their track record really helped us listen to what they said. If someone says, 'Try that, there,' and they have the track record that Bob Rock does, you try it," Mike describes. "You would be amazed at some of the ideas that sound silly, but when you actually put them into practice and hear them in the midst of the rest of the song, it sounds great."
"We had all watched Some Kind of Monster and had stories about other bands who had worked with Bob Rock in our heads going in, but he ended up being so chill. We felt super comfortable around him," says Charlie.
The relaxed atmosphere going into the studio to record was a direct result of the pre-production period they spent with Rock.
"He had been busy working on Michael Buble's album, and he said, 'I can do this record, but I need you to come out to where I live in Hawaii,'" Mike says. "We thought maybe he would hire a studio, but when we got there we realized that he had built a small, basic studio in the kitchen of his house. It was such a great environment to work in. It was very relaxing, there wasn't any sort of ego; there wasn't a chance for any when we were all in shorts."
"Since that was the first experience of working with him, when we eventually took those ideas into the big studios in L.A. and Vancouver to lay down the tracks,there wasn't that intimidation of walking into a huge room with all the equipment. We had been chilling in a bungalow with no air-conditioning for the last two weeks, so we knew each other pretty well," Charlie laughs.
The three long-time friends will get to know each other even better over the next few months together on the road with Sick Puppies and the Uproar Festival, during which they are excited to check out performances from Coheed and Cambria in particular. They are also eager to visit places like Chicago and Seattle.
"We're making a list of eateries and planning out all of our food stops," Charlie admits. "Toronto, New Orleans and New York are going to be awesome."
"It's like a road trip that we're going on, such an American thing to do. This country's so vast with many different cultures within it, and I can think of no better way to seeing it all than how we're going to. Seeing the landscape change is something I don't think any of us are mentally prepared for yet; it's going to be very eye-opening. Even just based on all the food places we want to go to, every area has its own special dish – that's going to be exciting. We're just going to have to watch our food intake!"
The Charming Liars are also excited to share the New Disorder EP with new audiences and have just premiered a video for the title track, their first single. Directed by Kyle Padilla, the video features three hot nuns tracking down evil throughout Los Angeles.
"We wanted to do something risqué, but fun and dark, too. It was actually a little bit more extreme than it turned out. We had to pull it in a bit, otherwise it wouldn't be played anywhere. It was shot over three days at Big Sky Ranch in Simi Valley where parts of Django Unchained were filmed. We also filmed in Chinatown, Malibu and Downtown," Charlie shares. "'New Disorder' is a kick-in-the-teeth rock song, a good official introduction, but once people hear the EP and eventually the rest of the album they'll see there are different sides to it, that it goes on a journey and that there are different grooves that not a lot of bands in our genre would normally do. It takes a couple of risks."
Taking risks has never been disconcerting for the Charming Liars, whether it's with their music or their lives in deciding to move the States from England. Another of the New Disorder EP's tracks, "Break Away," describes their philosophy of not wasting another day when it comes to the pursuit of their passions.
"It's actually the only song that we wrote in the UK that made it onto the album, and it was written at that point of us deciding to come over. There were a lot of things that we were tied down to – relationships, family stuff, school, jobs – that were holding us back from pursuing what we wanted to do," says Charlie. "We thought that it would be a good song to introduce listeners to the band and give a taste of the album, which is why we put it on the EP."
"There are memories and emotions attached to all of the songs," Mike admits. "We hadn't played a show by the time we finished recording, and we wondered if the songs would work live. There have definitely been some moments recently when we've been playing where you just look around at your mates and hear the songs sounding better than you could possibly imagined, and it justifies all of our decisions. It could have been very easy not to take this chance and leave home, but I'm glad that we did."
The New Disorder EP is currently available. Charming Liars perform Sept. 12 at House of Blues Anaheim and at the Uproar Festival Sept. 13 at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. For more information, visit charmingliars.com.
Kim West added some pink-hued butterflies fluttering amidst the carnage of a coyote fight captured in her Welcome to Hollywood, Everyone's Gotta Dream. Some Come True, Some Don't. piece from 2009 for this mural located near the main entrance of Wurstküche Restaurant on Traction Avenue (at South Hewitt Street) in the Downtown Arts District. Doesn't it make you hungry for a gourmet sausage and some beer?
A couple of months ago I caught an airing of INSIDE OUT: The People's Art Project on HBO, a film documenting JR's global art project that he created after winning the TED prize in 2011. It reminded me of the moving images that the French artist installed throughout Los Angeles that same year as part of his The Wrinkles of the City series, one of which served as the very first Street Signs. I captured another of JR's elderly faces on the back of the building that houses Angel City Brewery at 216 South Alameda Street in the Downtown Arts District. The eyes on this one are particularly captivating.
Came across this stencil on the cement as I was walking down East 3rd Avenue towards the Arts District in Downtown. Featuring Albert Einstein's face along with the words "All Things Are Relative," referring to his Theory of Relativity. One of my favorite quotes from the physicist on the topic is: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
The One with the Bubbles, located on East 3rd Street (between Wurstküche, Apolis: Common Gallery and the Poketo Flagship Store) in the Downtown Arts District, never fails to make me smile. Who didn't love to blow bubbles when they were younger? Maybe Kim West hopes to coax passerby to embrace their inner child and take some time to sit and blow some bubbles with the mural.
800 E. 3rd St., Los Angeles (Downtown) 213-687-4444
Laughter is contagious whenever spending any amount of time with Sirsy. The Upstate New York-based duo of Melanie Krahmer and Rich Libutti have been performing and writing songs together for 12 years, so it's no wonder that they share such an amazing rapport, and once you're around them it's easy to fall right into their habit of exchanging witty banter with one another.
"I slip just a tiny bit of drugs into his coffee every day," jokes vocalist, drummer and flautist Melanie of her longstanding musical partnership with guitarist Rich. "We really try to respect and listen to each other. We also bust each other's balls nonstop, so it's good."
I was able to witness quite a few playful exchanges between the two when they met me at Wurstküche on the day of their first L.A. show at the Viper Room last week. With its long wooden tables and benches, exposed brick walls and beamed ceilings, the gastropub – known for its German sausages and extensive list of imported beers – has a sleek yet welcoming vibe, conducive to gathering to catch up with a group of friends or getting to know your table neighbor.
Melanie chooses a British soda, Fentimans Mandarin and Seville Orange Jigger, to drink, while I go with an L.A. one, Reed's Spiced Apple Brew (homemade ginger ale with apple and lemon juice, honey, herbs and spices), which tastes just like apple pie. Being a beer aficionado, Rich is in his element and opts for the Floris Apple Ale, a Belgian wittier fermented with apples.
"It's really good," he offers, after taking a sip. "I love to go to different places and try everything when we travel, especially with the craft beer explosion. We hang out more and relax on the road. When you're 'self employed,' chasing your dream—"
"You feel guilty if you're not working the whole time," Melanie finishes. "We give ourselves more time to relax and enjoy a beer when we're on tour than when we're at home. I don't drink a lot of beer, but I am really into Lindemans Framboise, a Belgian Lambic. It tastes like fresh raspberries."
Wurstküche is the perfect location for Sirsy to get to know a unique section of Los Angeles since its located in the midst of the Downtown Arts District, filled with artist lofts, cool boutiques and cafés and an ever-changing array of street art murals. Since this is Melanie's first trip to the City of Angels and Rich has only passed through on his way to San Diego several years ago, I ask what they are interested in doing during this trip that's part of their first tour of the southwest in support of their fifth album, which released in March, Coming Into Frame, via Funzalo Records.
"The cheesy touristy thing is to go look at stars on the Walk of Fame, so we're going to go do that today," Melanie replies. "I've actually always wanted to go to the Viper Room, so I'm really excited that we're playing there."
"As we tour in different cities, we often go to places that are iconic in TV and movies, so we'll take a look at the Hollywood Sign," Rich adds. "In Dallas we went to Daley Plaza where JFK was shot."
"We do things you want to check off your bucket list while you're in that city," Melanie continues. "We saw the magical side of space travel on this trip, when we spent some time in Roswell, N.M. We went to the International UFO Museum, which was fun."
Aside from the usual Hollywood spots, Melanie has also been able to experience a favorite pastime of many Angelenos, shopping on Melrose Avenue. She shows me a skirt she found at American Vintage for a steal and admits that thrift shops are a frequent pit stop whenever they roll into a new city.
"It's really fun to go into those places; you never know what you're going to find," she says. "I got one of my favorite skirts in a thrift store in Asheville, N.C. I was looking through a rack and saw a Yoda skirt. This girl makes recycled clothing from scraps of material, so this was a skirt made from four different scraps and one had Yoda from Star Wars on it. It's literally a one-of-a-kind item. You get a little bit of the personality of the town from these local shops."
Although Melanie is vegan, there are several options for her to choose from on the Wurstküche grilled sausage menu. She orders the Vegetarian Smoked Apple Sage, and Rich gets the Sun Dried Tomato & Mozzarella with smoked chicken and turkey. My favorite item is actually the Belgian Fries, which are twice fried and served with one of their delectable dipping sauces that range from the spicy Chipotle Ketchup, creamy Bleu Cheese, Walnut & Bacon, savory Sundried Tomato Mayo and the Sweet & Sassy BBQ.
Sirsy plays over 200 shows a year, so they spend an inordinate time on the road and have of course developed some habits over the course of their 12 years together.
"This is actually not a very secret guilty pleasure that Rich has: He enjoys really cheesy music from the '60s and '70s, and he's made a five-hour 'driving mix' that he forces everyone to listen to in the van while he sings at the top of his lungs. If you see our band live, you'll notice that Rich doesn't sing, and there's a reason for that, which will be reinforced if you ride in the van and listen to him sing 'if you like Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain' at the top of his lungs," Melanie laughs.
"I might have tortured everyone on the way here from Tucson with my guilty pleasure," Rich admits and then divulges Melanie's on-the-road guilty pleasure. "She wears an assortment of shoe wear as most women do, and on long rides she likes to take those shoes off and put on these fuzzy socks that are soft so she can relax."
"I usually put my feet up on the dashboard and recline. That's true, I do that," she confesses before sharing their usual habit as a duo. "One of our favorite places in New York City where we go every time we're in town is a little falafel place called Mamoun's. Even though it's 2013, somehow you can get an entire meal there for $3. Every time we play in Greenwich Village we go there."
Rich grew up in Rhode Island, while Melanie was raised an hour outside of Albany, and they had distinctly different musical upbringings. For Melanie, the first time she heard the Beatles' Abbey Road, her life changed. She also loved Thriller by Michael Jackson and older jazz artists like Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald and Etta James.
"My family liked music, but there weren't any musicians in my family. When I was a freshman in high school, the person who sat behind me alphabetically in homeroom the first day was this guy Steve, who actually became my best friend. He said to me very early on in our friendship, 'I play guitar. You should play bass so we could meet girls,'" Rich remembers with a laugh. "So I begged my parents to buy me a bass, and we didn't really accomplish the girl thing."
"Unbeknownst to them they were both nerds, so that was the flaw in their plan," Melanie interjects. "Unlike Rich, I grew up in a very musical household. My father is an amazing piano player, so my first instrument was voice because I used to sing along with him. Then I learned to play the piano. In the fourth grade, they make you choose an instrument, and I really wanted to play the saxophone. My mother said, 'Saxophone is $600, and the flute is $200, so you will be playing the flute.' My mother's very supportive, but they were broke. That's when I started playing flute and had my illustrious career as a band geek. I was in drama club and sang in school plays. I've always been pretty musical and it's always been what I wanted to do. I think RIch wanted to be an astronaut."
"There's no jobs for astronauts though anymore, so I went this way instead," he chuckles. "When you're a kid, your parents tell you that you can be anything you want – President of the United States, an astronaut. Then when you're applying to colleges they say, 'You can still be whatever you want, but maybe you should major in something that you can get a job with. As a musician, you face a life of making no money, so I went to school for Biology, toying with the idea of going to med school. I always had many interests but music was always that one underlying thing. It was always there as something that I liked."
"It's a blessing and a curse when you're a good student because when you're a nerd, people expect you to go into a brainier career. Music, being in a rock band, was not traditionally thought of as a brainy career, but it's where my heart has always been. I thought that if I wanted to do music as a career I had to be a music teacher or something more traditional. I didn't think I could be a performer and songwriter as a career that was always my dream," Melanie concurs. "I was actually pre law, then I had this eye-opening experience. The fourth class I went to, they said the required text was the Great Dialogues of Plato, and I was like, 'what am i doing with my life? I don't want to do this.'"
"I had been in a bunch of different bands, but it wasn't until I started writing songs with Melanie that I felt that music was a realistic possibility," Rich recalls. "We worked really hard at it, to the point where we both petered out of serious jobs. It's been eight or nine years since we had any other job. We've been out there pounding the pavement touring."
"We started playing music together, and the first time that it really hit me was looking into a crowd of people and seeing a bunch of people I didn't know singing along to a song that we made up. That was amazing," Melanie remembers. "We would get an e-mail from a fan saying this song changed my life, and there's nothing like that in the world. That's it for me, the fact that we're able to connect with people and change their lives in some way. It doesn't get any better, even if we're broke for the rest of our lives, it's worth it."
Rich and Melanie began as a two-piece, playing acoustic music but writing indie rock tunes. They wrote and released three albums – Baggage (2000), Away From Here (2002) and Ruby (2004) – and hired more band members to translate the songs to stage. Unfortunately they were never able to find the right mix, and
"It's really hard to have a cohesive sound when you keep going through band members, but it's also really hard to find two people who are as insane as we are and want to live on the road, play as many shows and basically not have a life outside of the band. That's where the two us, where our hearts have always been so it's not a sacrifice for us to do it. We lucked out and found each other. When we write and play songs ,we generally are on the same page. We tried but never really found that with anybody else," she tells. "After going through many changeovers, we just said, 'Let's go back to a two-piece and play all of the instruments ourselves.'"
So ever since 2006, she has played a full drum kit on stage while singing and shared bass duties on a keyboard with Rich (who plays the keyboard with his feet). The released their first effort as a duo, Revolution, in 2007, working on every single aspect themselves, from building a studio at Rich's house to recording and producing. With their fifth full-length, Coming Into Frame, they pushed themselves even further by expanding their recording horizons by working with a pair of award-winning producers, Paul Kolderie (Lemonheads, Buffalo Tom, Uncle Tupelo) and Sean Slade (Radiohead, Hole, Dresden Dolls, Pixies).
"Working with Paul and Sean, who have worked with some of our favorite artists, we already knew that we trusted them going in. They came and saw us live, so they got our vibe," Melanie says. "They said they wanted to capture the live energy that we have on stage. They noticed that when we played one song live there was a peak when it sped up and was exciting. They said we shouldn't record it with a click track, that we didn't need to use a metronome."
"In a Lady Gaga/Katy Perry world of music production, everything is very structured and rigid, mathematically laid out and Auto-Tuned, and we didn't want to make a record like that," adds Rich.
"I don't like to use Auto-Tune on my voice. If I can't sing it in tune, then I shouldn't be singing it, and that was their philosophy, too, on the record. We were breaking all types of rules, but we were able to capture more of us live," Melanie says. "They used a lot of our production ideas, taught us so much and really made us grow. It's our best album because of them. I like to think that we got better as songwriters, but a lot of it came fem working with them."
"Also, we wrote way more songs than we ever have. We wrote 25 songs, and 10 made it on the CD. In the end it's the 10 that we're most happy to have on there," Rich says.
As Sirsy has made their way across the country debuting songs from Coming Into Frame, Melanie says that the first two songs on the album, "Cannonball" and "Lionheart," have been going over well because they're full of energy and fun. There are two other tracks from the album that really move audiences as well and hold special meaning to the close-knit musical pair.
"I don't share this very often, but I actually went through a battle with breast cancer while we were writing the album, so 'Brave and Kind' and 'Gold' both came from that place. When you go through something like that, it just comes out of you, so I think that's why they speak to people," she says. "I've had several people come up to me after shows and say 'That song 'Brave and Kind,' I went through this and this, and that song, it's me, how did you write that?' It's neat for me to take something that's a life struggle, learn from it and be able to make a song that speaks to other people. That's pretty special for me."
Coming Into Frame is currently available. For more information, visit sirsy.com.
