By purchasing this album here, directly from me, you're supporting me as an artist and ensuring I can continue to produce and promote my DIY music. I'll put everything I make into creating more. If you can't afford the price, please send me a message and we can work out a way for you to get the music and enjoy it.

About Reston:

In February of 2021, I couldn't bend my leg. The world had been in lockdown for almost a year. I had just endured the breakup of a loving relationship of 4+ years in October. The prolonged close-proximity forced on us by the pandemic era, pushed us to grow apart. So many romantic relationships were either born or died under that pressure. I moved out of my Washington, DC apartment and in with an acquaintance in northern Virginia. The whole country was stressed and strained during that time. I remember the truck ride into town on January 6th to evacuate some friends and family during the Capitol Riots. A tank rolled down my old street, where I used to walk every day for a break from the confines of a two-room world.

Some time around New Year’s Eve, I had declared that 2021 would be a time of healing. My brain, my heart, my spirit and my body. I scheduled a surgery that I’d probably needed for over a decade. After six dislocations of my left knee, physical therapy and recovery each time felt more and more hopeless. So, on 1/21/21 I went under the knife and started a thirteen week recovery period in a townhouse, in an unfamiliar suburb, far from my home and any community, in the dark and cold of winter.

My new roommate was a character. A sort of angel, brilliant and tortured. She collected people and animals that were in need of shelter and gave them a place to be. Hence me. She was working almost all of the time and I would have largely had the house to myself but for the exception of two cuddly cats and two ear-piercing parrots, Icarus and Pete. At one point, later in my recovery, we were joined by another wayward human male and his adorable dog.

In the very beginning, a new friend, one who would later become one of my great loves, came to visit and help me through the surgery and the first grueling week afterward. I was arguably over-medicated, disoriented and moody. She helped me with food and medicine. She kept me company and she kept me positive; another angel. After she departed, the realities of my impending marathon recovery really set-in. I was going to have to heal in this place. And that long journey was going to be one I could only fully take with myself.

All of the bedrooms in the house were upstairs. For the month of February and most of March, I was in a brace from hip to ankle, and it was a minor odyssey downstairs to get food and supplies for the day. I felt very much like the man in the iron mask, or Rapunzel. I spent the days making music, napping and binge-watching old sci-fi television shows in my studio. It was really just a small bedroom next to mine that my roommate had gifted me. A private space to spread out into when my bedroom proved too confining. A couch, two desks filled with my recording gear, a tv for a monitor, a chair, several guitars and all of the art I could manage to get out of closet storage and hang up on the walls. A place in the world that was just mine. I had a single window facing a small patch of woods that had been allowed to remain, encircled by the back yards of the houses in our neighborhood. I lovingly grew to refer to this little grove as “the illusion of nature”. A manufactured sense of living in the forest, but with safe, walkable paths to the nearest strip mall to fulfill any of your animal needs. As the weather warmed, I’d see deer, squirrels or neighborhood kids playing and growing out my window. Which painted this place with a little more light.

In that one room, I wrote and recorded fourteen new songs. I played every instrument and performed all of the backing vocals. I had time, so I leaned into making fuller arrangements with more production value. I mixed and mastered this record myself. A snapshot from a pivotal moment in my personal journey, set against a backdrop of a pandemic lockdown. Reston, is the first 8 of those songs to be released. I’ve left them just how they were made at the time. There are 6 other tracks that I’ll approach recording and producing again later. But I’ve decided I’m proud to share these selections in celebration and reflection of the songs and stories that flowed through my life during the first year of covid.

I’m not sure why it’s taken nearly 3 years to do so. Maybe I wasn’t sure that this was a sound that I wanted to publish or present. To be honest, I don’t know if releasing and promoting music felt appropriate at the time. Regardless, I didn’t have the energy or the focus to take on the task. All I could do was heal and create. I was a seed. The ensuing summer, after learning to walk again, I would be released into the wind and begin a new adventure that would change my life drastically and permanently. Maybe this album is coming out now, because I am only now beginning to feel like I’ve finished that journey. I’ve finally landed and put down my roots. For now, I have a safe and stable moment to look back on everywhere and everyone I have been since I began.

I hope you can take something of truth from this album and that you enjoy listening to my music. Thank you for your support, as I begin to release a large collection of works that I’ve written and recorded over the last few years. It means everything to me that you might hear and know.

For the rest of the story, of how I came to live and work as an artist in New York City, you’ll have to stay tuned.



Love,

Julian