If Fatal Attraction was an intentional dive into the dark, this album was a necessary escape into the light. Right before Fatal dropped, I hit an emotional wall. I was navigating some incredibly hard things that brought me back to the vulnerability of being a child, a time in my early life that wasn't very easy, which I explore on the track "Where I Leave You." But instead of sitting in that sadness, I knew I had to create my own sunshine in the middle of winter 2025. My twenties have taught me that you have to build yourself up, believe in yourself, and learn to thrive on your own. This album is the physical proof of that resilience.

The defining symbol for this era is the sun, inspired by a saying from Mariah Carey: you have to get through the storm before the sun comes back. I wrote this album through the highs of being in love and the sadness of falling out of it, pulling inspiration from every pocket of happiness I could find. Unlike my past work, Hold Me Here sheds all insecurity. As I sing on the title track, I've "let go of all the doubt and the fears", finally reaching a place of total peace.

I’ve always been a true crime junkie with a deep love for the ‘80s, so when I started building the aesthetic for Fatal Attraction, I completely fell in love with the era. Making this record was an incredibly fun, surreal experience. Interestingly, while I was intentionally pulling myself into a very claustrophobic, dark conceptual space, my actual life at the time felt like it was at an all-time high.

But there were still hard things happening behind the scenes, and creating the character of Damien allowed me to process those difficult feelings and express my deepest, darkest thoughts without holding back. This is genuinely my favorite project I have ever made. I don't think I'll ever top it when it comes to pure world-building and consistency. I might deliver better vocals or production on other projects, but the sheer weight and fun of this entire era, bringing the album, the short film, the Fatal Sessions, and the experience to life, makes it completely unmatched for me.

This is definitely my most true-to-form "independent artist" album. I was recording in my school's maker studio, which required booking strict two-hour slots. I vividly remember recording one of the songs, running out of time, and getting kicked out because another group was waiting for the room. I ended up finishing the vocals right there in my car. In fact, I wrote almost the entire album over three days in the backseat of a car during a trip to Atlanta. Conceptually, I wanted to capture the essence of teen love, the excitement of falling, the uncertainty, and the back-and-forth of not knowing where you stand. Because the original creation process was a bit of a rush, I ended up revisiting the project later on. After listening to the album for a couple of months, I was able to pick out exactly what I would change with the vocals and production. That process of tweaking and refining is what gave birth to the Untangled version, which was so much fun to put together. I’m incredibly proud of what I built under those circumstances.

This is my Christmas project, which I was actually working on right alongside my debut album. The title track came together so spontaneously. Not long after I wrote my debut single, "More Than A Crush," I was just sitting in my room humming some chords. The words baby wish for me popped into my head, so I sang it into my voice notes. I went about my day, came back home, started recording a scratch vocal, produced it, and just like that, we had the record. Because my focus was split with my debut, I originally planned to release this first but swapped the schedule at the last minute so my grand introduction wouldn't be a holiday release. Looking back, I associate this era with a lot of hectic energy. While I'm proud of the sound we captured on the title track, there is a lot I would do differently now, and I hope to one day go back, tweak the project, or even record a second Christmas album.

Your debut really lays the groundwork for everything that follows. After getting back into my creative space, I had been writing constantly (I wrote "Too Late" way back in 2021). But once I wrote "More Than A Crush," I instantly knew I had to build an entire album around it. That song was so much fun to write; it captured the sound of the artists I was listening to but spun it into my own unique thing. Whenever I played it for people, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, so that track holds a lot of meaning for me. I wrote about twenty songs, flew to St. Martin to shoot the visuals, and ended up tweaking the tracklist while moving into my college dorm just to get it out by September. Listening back to this record now, it captures a time when my mind was just rapidly understanding music, figuring out how to write, what I wanted to write about, and who I was as an artist. It's one of my most out-of-the-box, exploratory projects, pulling from so many different styles, yet it all came together as a cohesive debut.