I started playing the drums when I was eight. I spent most of my twenties making records and traveling the country, and am lucky enough to still get a chance to play with talented friends. One thing I have never wanted to do, though, is make a solo record. I have never wanted to try and out-Ringo Ringo, or see if I could make something more wonderfully awful than Two Sides of the Moon. And I am convinced that one drummer’s version of “You Can’t Hurry Love” is more than enough.

I have always wanted to write. In fact, I was writing short stories before I played in my first band: “Sheerluck Homely,” my forced spoof of that British detective I loved, preceded Spiral, a cover band that somehow tackled The Cars and Lynyrd Skynyrd, by two years. Later, while on the road with Uncle Green, or off the road and waiting for the next phase of our career to begin, I wrote a series of bad training novels. There’s the book I wrote while in love with Vonnegut, the one I wrote trying to be wordy and oh so Updike-ian, and the thing I wrote trying to decide if maybe science fiction was my calling. I can’t look at any of them now, but writing them I learned how to start and finish something. Turns out that having long drives across the country is very helpful for writers-in-training. Ann Patchett is right: “Freedom and boredom is where art is made.”

I no longer have hours to kill in a van, so The Weight of Sound—as close to a solo record as I will ever get—took me five years to finish. To celebrate the completion of one project by starting another, I am launching this website. I’ll talk about the book, the songs in the book, the ways that drumming is like writing (and parenting, too; drumming, it turns out, is actually like a lot of other stuff), and maybe even, someday, the next book. You can consider this a safe space, to try and convince me that I’m wrong about the second season of Master of None, or even to confess your love for Phil Collins.