A Wild Dream

The chapter is closed. A Wild Dream has reached its final breath, with Cartoon Eyes set to release on March 25th as the last single. A story told in three songs—one final echo before the silence.

I’m proud of these recordings, though the process tested me. I wanted to create something that was wholly mine—without interference, without outside voices shaping the direction. Just me, the music, and the tools placed before me. In the past, though I wrote the songs, they never truly felt like my own. There were always other hands in the mix, other ideas, other forces steering the vehicle. It’s a natural thing—when you let others into the creative process, they bring their own maps, their own sense of direction. But A Wild Dream was never about perfection. It wasn’t about pristine production or polished delivery. It was about truth.

It was about remembering where I came from, tracing the steps that led me here, and deciding how to move forward with the weight of that understanding. Each song carried a piece of that reflection.

“Memories” was a reckoning with the past—the journeys, the forgotten hard drives filled with places I once roamed but never shared. Looking back at the years, I saw a road paved by music, by motion, by something greater than myself. And in the quiet of a dream, I heard the call: keep going. There was still more to do, more to see. From that revelation, I wrote “Cruise.” A dream within a song, a whisper in the wind telling me that music is not the destination—it is only the soundtrack. Life is the journey. I am the traveler.

The final song, “Cartoon Eyes,” was the closing of a wound. A conversation with Betty, a reckoning with the boy who once stood in the ashes of a bridge he refused to burn. Here, at last, he speaks his truth, he lets go, he walks away. The heart is healed, the path is open. It’s just three songs—a glimpse of a soul deciding which way to walk, or whether to walk at all.

A few days ago, I took my bike along a familiar trail in the northeast woods of Pennsylvania, winding alongside the Delaware River. The same trail I had ridden countless times before. But this time, something was different. The rains of the past years had left their mark, washing away the soil, reshaping the land.

There were stretches of the path that remained smooth—easily traveled, effortlessly enjoyed. And then there were others, uneven and broken, demanding more effort, more awareness. I kept riding, kept pushing forward, until I reached a place where the trail simply vanished. The river had swallowed it whole. As far as I could see, there was no way through.

In that moment, I had to decide: Do I turn back? Do I walk until I find another path? Do I wait? Or do I press forward, trusting that beyond this break in the road, something else awaits?

Life is the same.

We all start on a smooth path, gliding forward with ease, unaware of the obstacles ahead. But soon, the road changes. The terrain shifts beneath us. Some parts become rocky, forcing us to navigate carefully. And then there are places where the road disappears entirely. The beauty of the world remains—the trees, the sky, the whisper of the wind—but the path itself is gone.

And we are left to decide: Do we keep going?

Sometimes, we must dismount. Walk the uneven ground. Trust that beyond the unseen horizon, the path smooths out again. There will be stretches of ease, of joy, where the ride feels effortless once more. And then, just as suddenly, a new challenge will rise before us—an obstruction in the road, a detour we did not expect.

Maybe it will rain. Maybe the cold will bite. Maybe we will look at the washed-out road ahead and wonder why we ever started riding in the first place.

But the real question is this:

How badly do you want to keep going?