- [Announcer] "Making" is presented by The Coal Yard Cafe in Ithaca, New York.

(gentle music) (upbeat drum music) - I was probably five spreading things out on the kitchen floor, beating on things.

And I remember hearing the ELO tune, "Don't Bring Me Down," and getting these goosebumps, you know.

I started taking lessons when I was eight.

I had a great drum teacher that just happened to live down the street from me.

By the time I was 10, I was in the 500 drum corps, and by the time I was 12, I was out of it because I had gotten into some trouble.

I was hanging around older kids doing things I shouldn't have been doing.

I went to college for a couple years.

I had gotten a scholarship into a jazz program at a college around where I grew up.

At that time, my first band, Dazzling Kilman had already started, and we were making records and touring and I was kind of doing the stuff that I was going to school to learn how to do.

And so I ended up leaving and I just pursued music at that point full time.

I must have borrowed a four track from a friend or I had one in my practice space.

I was probably 18.

It was just me in the studio and I saw that equipment down there and I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna try this out."

I recorded a couple drum tracks that I layered, and then on that one, I actually put a little bit of vocal to it, more like a spoken word thing.

And I was like so proud of myself, I felt so cool.

Like I was like, I can make records is what it felt like.

You know, like there was all this possibility.

The studio is one of my favorite places to be because it's sort of like me getting to be a painter and sitting just with a canvas and my palette, you know, and being able to take my time and kind of be meditative about it.

Get a lot of different sounds from the same instruments sometimes just by, like say with a drum how I might tune the drum, what I might use to strike the drum with, the microphone that I use, the distance of that microphone.

There's different ethnic hand percussion on there.

There's sort of just junky things that I bang on and that I find and scraps and things.

All those sort of variables I kind of use to help expand my color palette.

I love the recording part.

It's one of my favorite aspects, but I have more anxiety while I'm doing that because it's just more of an intense experience.

When that part is done and I'm in the mixing process and the editing process and I'm really going through everything and I'm like, "All right, what did we get here?

What can we make from this?"

Starting to create the world from there, because I feel like I have so many ideas, I just need the time to get them out.

I hadn't put out a full length record in over 10 years, and it was time, and I started going through some old things I had recorded and like, oh, there's some good ideas here.

Oh, maybe I could do this.

And I started finding a lot of material that I had started but never finished.

I started thinking of the idea that I have all this material I'm coming across, I have this material that I already put out, I have some new material that I'm working on.

What if I start to blend all that together and make a whole new record?

Recording it myself, putting out the record myself, and doing the crowdfunding so that I can do that.

I like to be in control of my own work and my own artwork.

And it was pretty stressful on me at times.

People just see the successes that I've had.

They don't see the things that I've done to get to those successes that were all rejected or the disappointment that you had within yourself about different things.

It's difficult because everybody's attention is, you know, in this direction, in that direction, is being grabbed and and vied for by so many things.

But that's the reality of being an independent artist in 2024, 2025, whatever in the 21st century.

I play the drums.

It's one of the oldest instruments, you know, if not the oldest.

So there's a definite primitive aspect that's just inherent in the instrument.

The fact that it's so physical and visceral, through the heartbeat, through the rhythm, through something, through some sort of pulse, right?

And then ideally, there's a modern aspect to it, meaning that that's my own growth and relating how I play the instrument to the times that I live in.

And hoping that the way that I interpret the world through that instrument comes out in its own unique voice.

That's one of my biggest goals is to have a recognizable voice on the instrument.

Being aware of tradition, but also, you know, not being tied to it necessarily.

Hopefully people will see the instrument in a little bit of a different light maybe.

Whether you love me or hate me, that I had my own voice, you know, that I had my own approach, that I was somebody who was truly artistic and ideally innovative on the instrument.

That would be a pretty cool legacy.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Making" is made possible with support from the Coal Yard Cafe in Ithaca, New York, from Beer Properties, and from viewers like you.