It’s so easy to say that Decembers have always been complicated months for me. Who isn’t it complicated for? Every year, we run around and we try to express ourselves to our family and friends with commerce and we put pressure on ourselves to have the most fun ever on the very last night of every year.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a simple December, starting in 1994 when as a sophomore in high school, 4 days after Christmas, my family moved a thousand miles east to a place that felt ten thousand miles away culturally.

In 1997, this feeling of anxiety toward the last month of the year was heightened when as a freshman in college I had to tell my parents my 17-year old girlfriend was pregnant. I proposed to her on Christmas Eve that year with a ton of my family around, and it felt right for such a monumental decision to be made during December. We were married for 15 years, something no one expected when neither the bride nor groom could legally drink at their own wedding.

“We’re in lockdown.”

On December 13, 2013, my son Ian heard a gunshot while in class, and was subsequently put in lockdown for the next six hours. An 18-year old senior used a legally-purchased shotgun to come to Arapahoe High School and murder a girl named Claire in the hallway. He shot her in the face, which was the first shot my son heard. I’m not sure if my son heard the second shot, which was the murderer taking his own life.

This was by far the worst ordeal I’ve ever lived through, and am just now getting the help I need to manage the panic attacks that rarely but still happen to me.

And so: Music.

I wrote my 6th-ish album for a simple reason: I needed to get these feelings out of my brain and music is the easiest way for me to do it. This album is made up of three tracks and is only 10 minutes long. Each song represents the month of December for the year it’s named:

12//13

This song is my exploration of what it was like to go through the process of learning my son was locked inside of his school with an active shooter two years ago. I started it with a ton of siren sounds, which I toned back a lot for the final version because it was a little too jarring. When I wrote this song, I forced myself to walk through the memories of that day, and to take the conflicting and misaligned emotions and turn them into music. This song started out as a trigger for my anxiety, and has since become a way to focus on the pain so that I can heal from it.

12//14

Last December wasn’t nearly as traumatizing as 2013, but it came with its own set of ups and downs. I spent a good portion of it jet-lagged and sad in Rome. On the first anniversary of my son living through the shooting, I was 5,500 miles away on a work trip and separated from his mother, well on our way to divorce. I missed my girlfriend a lot and I’d had some really tough travel to get to Italy and wasn’t looking forward to the trip back. The month did end in a pretty amazing way on New Year’s Eve, for having such a turbulent middle. This song attempts to roll that all into one, which is hard. Drums ended up being unnecessary.

12//15

Which brings me to this year. The calmest December I’ve had in a while, it still started with me desperately needing (and starting) therapy for the PTSD I’ve been suffering since the shooting. This year also ended with me learning that it’s unhealthy and untenable to hold on to dreams you first felt when you were a child. I learned this year that it’s easy to build someone up in your heart and mind into a sculpture of a human that no one can live up to. This was painful to experience and this song attempts to capture the loss I’ve felt this year, and the destruction I put myself and others through just to experience it.