How I Spent My Summer — Digging Into The Archive
Eight weeks ago I started doing something simple: opening the archive one day at a time.
A concert filmed from the crowd in 2008. A song recorded in my basement studio. A night at an open mic in Novato. One piece a day, posted with a few lines about where it came from and why I kept it. Nothing fancy. Just the habit of sharing.
What happened next surprised me. Tens of thousands of people found their way to these clips — most of them people who had never heard of me. A film of Roger Waters performing “Money” traveled far beyond anyone I know. So did Danny Hutton, still singing at 83. Strangers stopped scrolling long enough to watch, and some of them stayed. If you’re one of the new arrivals: welcome. You picked a good week to show up, because I want to tell you where all this is headed.
How we got here
For most of the past year I went quiet. I was finishing a memoir — Taking the Helm: Compass and Tides — and a book like this one doesn’t get finished in the margins. It asks for everything.
But the archive behind it has been building for most of my life. I started saving things as a teenager: recordings, photographs, film, journals from decades of sailing, paintings, letters. Sixty years of making things and keeping them. And then, after my mother died suddenly in 2023, a carefully assembled archive passed to me — letters, photographs, home movies, and a manuscript she never published. It revealed truths that had been hiding in plain sight for decades. Truths, I should say, that I had already begun to discover. Her archive didn’t start this story. It deepened it, and it changed how I understood everything I’d been carrying.
The truth is, I’ve spent five years learning how to share all this — while the platforms kept changing under my feet, the way the sea does.
That’s what The Journeyman Project is: one integrated body of work — the memoir at its heart, and around it the music, the paintings, the photographs, the films, the sailing logs, the letters. Nearly one hundred years of it, counting what was handed down to me.
Where we are
The memoir is finished and making its way out into the world — I’ll share more on that journey when there’s news to tell. The third volume of the companion music, written alongside the manuscript, is in final production, timed to arrive with the book, but you can listen to the first two volumes on Spotify.
And I’m coming back to the stage. On Sunday, September 6, I’ll be a featured songwriter at the Sunday Songwriter Showcase & Sing-Along Service at The Lost Church, 545 Mendocino Ave, Santa Rosa, doors at 1:30, show 2:15–4:00 — my first featured show in a while. If you’re anywhere near Sonoma County, come sing with us. I’d love to meet you.
Lost Church Sept 6
Tickets are $10 — and the code earlybird9 takes $3 off through August 30.
What’s coming next
Here’s the part I’m most excited to tell you. I will be relaunching SunTurtle Studios Archival website this Fall.
We’re building a new SunTurtle Studios — a place organized like the collection it holds, six rooms you can wander: The Vault, where the family archive lives. The Reading Room, for the books, lyrics, and essays. The Basement Studio, for the music. Behind the Lens, for the films and photographs. The Captain’s Log, actual passages from my sailing logs across the decades. And Valley of the Moon — Fine Art & Prints, for the paintings — and, for the first time, prints you’ll be able to hang in your home.
Here’s an early glimpse of the new front door:
“ONE ARCHIVE. ONE HUNDRED YEARS.”
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You’ll get the first tour here, before anywhere else. That’s one of the quiet advantages of being a subscriber — you’re not following a feed, you’re inside the workshop.
So tell me something, while the paint is still wet: which room would you walk into first? Reply or leave a comment — you’ll be steering more than you know.
(And yes — I’m keeping careful notes on how all of this is being built, one piece at a time. That’s a story for another day.)
Until then, I’ll keep doing what these eight weeks have taught me to do: open the archive, one day at a time, and tell you the story of what’s inside.
Thanks for being here. It means more than you know.
If someone you love keeps old photographs, old songs, or old letters — send this their way. They’ll understand what we’re building.
☀️🐢 SunTurtle Studios® · Valley of the Moon 🌙 · 1 Archive – 100 Years
The Journeyman Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
