Reliable people are gifts. Every band, organization, friendship, family, and community depends on them. They are the people who remember, anticipate, stabilize, repair, follow through, and quietly carry momentum forward when things get difficult. In music, you see it everywhere. There’s the person who always shows up prepared. The person who finds and arranges the… More »
Author Archives: Chris Steele
Getting Things Together
I’ve been a little quiet here lately, but for good reason. A lot of time has gone into writing and recording the next album. I’ve been cleaning up last year’s takes and layering in some newer songs, and it’s starting to feel like something real is taking shape. Also, I was listening to the new… More »
March On
Sorry I’ve been a little quiet lately, folks, but it’s February Album Writing Month, and you know what that means. Every February, a couple thousand songwriters gather at FAWM.org and challenge themselves to write 14 songs in 28 days. (Full disclosure: I haven’t attempted this in a leap year, so I’m not sure what happens… More »
Remember to Show All Your Work (Recording in Progress)
Can’t you just hear it now from when you were about to take a test in school?: Remember to show all your work. Whatever the answer, if you couldn’t show how you got there, you didn’t get full credit. The thinking mattered. The process mattered. I hadn’t thought about that in a while, but somewhere… More »
Let Me Give You a Hand
Very happy new year, everyone, and I hope that you are all well rested and looking forward to 2026. Granted, it is an interesting time, but it seems that it pretty much always is. In my latest newsletter, I teased that there were a couple of things I wanted to write a little bit more… More »
Signals of Gratitude (And a Farewell to 2025)
As the year winds down, I’ve been thinking about how much can change in twelve months—not just in the world around us, but in the small, private spaces where life actually happens. And since I’m posting this on December 21 (2112 Day for those who get it) it felt like the right moment to pause,… More »
Ten Years of Music and Random Thoughts
On October 30, 2015, I put up my first post here (as well as the rest of this website). I didn’t know if anyone would read it, and I certainly didn’t have any particular plan to still be writing it ten years later. Yet here we are. What started as a place to share the… More »
A New Corner
Back in July, I found myself at New Hampshire Motor Speedway—not as a spectator, not even as a participant in the way most might imagine, but as a flagging and communications marshal for SCCA races. It was my first full outing in the role, and it was a blast. It all started back on Memorial… More »
Nine Hotels
Greetings from Santiago de Chile. It’s been quite an adventure since I last wrote, and if I’m honest, I’m ready to be home. Some of you might remember The Accidental Tourist – a book and later a film about a man who hates travel but makes a living writing guidebooks, finding the little comforts that… More »
Gear Acquisition Syndrome
As we move through the summer and I record songs for the next album, I’ve been revisiting a lot of the guitar “toys” I’ve collected over the years. Funny thing — some of them are now considered officially vintage. I posted about this on Instagram, and the response made me think I should give a… More »