(play this while you read)

I love ambient music. sm.

I love the way it defines its own time and space: we play it when we need to think, when we need to create, when we need to become. Ambient music is the natural partner to creation: soothing synths, keys, bells, and drones that massage your brainwaves as you attempt to do the impossible—to bring forth an original idea.

My intensified love for ambient music began only about three months ago, at the annual Steve Jobs Archive retreat. We were lucky enough to get a pre-screening of *Eno* – the Brian Eno biopic that used generative technology to create a unique timeline for every. single. screening. (no other audience will ever share the same experience we had that day - insane).

I learned so much from Sir Eno and his definitions of the creative process, but one thing really stuck with me. While attempting to rebrand himself—rolling off the edge of a career as an attempted rockstar and landing in the undiscovered ocean of ambient music—he created a one-liner to keep his artistic vision cohesive:


Or something like that. Ngl, it's not an exact quote. But regardless, that line more than anything else really hit me. At the time, I was neck-deep in an existential crisis, pretty convinced I was shit at everything and destined to make nothing of myself (lol). Hearing that someone as successful and talented as Eno had experienced a similar crisis of faith, and that he found his way out by scraping together a few simple words that helped him settle down and focus was incredibly comforting. He was able to create meaning within chaos.


I was born and raised in a family where meaning only came through utility. For generations, we scraped by on railroads, coal mines, and GI benefits in the Appalachian Mountains. Though I'm probably about a 20th-generation American, I'm only the second to attend college. Before my parents, higher education was always an unnecessary and insurmountable expense. My mother went to school in West Virginia, but my dad used his GI bill to finish school in Arizona—making me the first generation born and raised outside Appalachia.

From what I've been told, life there is tough: the hills are old, the air is old. My family hunted to eat, owned dogs to ward off raccoons and shot dogs that stole shoes off porches during harsh winters.

My mom is the hardest-working individual on planet Earth; her tough skin freckled by the distant memory of pine needles. When she was thirteen, my grandpa bought a 10-acre piece of land, and for the next three months, he, my mom, and my uncle spent 10 hours a day planting a pine tree grove.

"This is for our family," my grandpa said with pride. I've only ever seen it from the satellite view on Google Maps.


My brother and I were west-coasters; "city cousins," they called us, despite living in a town with a population of about 5,000 (admittedly about 20 minutes away from a *massive* town of 20,000).

In the summers, we visited my cousins who were told to chop down five trees instead of standing in the corner for five minutes. Cousins who taught me to ride a horse bareback through the river without falling off. We slept in the house that my grandparents worked like dogs for years and saved money to build. 

Utility was paramount here. Every penny collected, every receipt saved, every piece of wood burned, every piece of hay baled, every unruly fern pulled. Each action a note in an endless composition of survival.

I have remained the “city cousin”, though now I’m also dubbed the "California Liberal." These days, I often feel frustrated by the friction between myself and every other member of my family. My parents moved back to Appalachia after I went to college and my brother is gone, leaving me as this weird, distant relative planted firmly on the other side of the country from everything my blood has ever known.

I remember the times when I tried to overcome this disconnection; I lived for summers when my mom would take us "home" to West Virginia, where I could ride horses and swing on grapevines with my cousins and their silly accents. My mom used to joke that I lived in there, and just visited the deserts of Arizona for 11 months of the year. I’d like to think that kind of innocence is still buried deep somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains. 

As I grew older and busier, and visits to West Virginia became less frequent, I began to carve out an identity under blazing suns. As a bratty teenager who despised her parents and every other older, authoritative relative, I reveled in the differences between myself and where I came from. I thought I was smarter and more modern; I studied computers and won scholarships. I was surely the generation truly advancing the family name - taking the burden of success my grandparents had created and my parents had shouldered. I was pushing it over the hill so many of us had been buried on.

Then my brother enlisted. And died in his barracks. And was buried on that hill. Suddenly, blood was thicker than water.

I spun into a life of chaos, leaving school, recklessly chasing dreams, suspended on the cliff of excitement hovering over a cavern of insanity, toes barely scraping the ground.

I nearly slipped off the edge many times: the closest time being when I expressed to my parents that I wanted to make music, that I wanted to take this life of utility they had slaved over and turn it into art.

They tried their best to understand, to support me even. But I could feel the friction in the knob on the car radio, turning my new song into a low, indistinguishable humming, blending perfectly into the stale tension between us.

But my fingernails were dug deep into the corners of excitement, the only saving grace that allowed me to slowly crawl back up onto solid ground. And somehow, that persistence had landed me here, at this retreat, surrounded by the most intimidatingly brilliant artists, skilled musicians, intuitive filmmakers, sophisticated technologists...

The strangest group of thinkers I had ever encountered; and I felt I was different from them too. I wanted to to feel immerssed, but I was still my mother's daughter, and there was a persistent voice reminding me that the proceedings were ‘pretentious’ and ‘over-done’. I was desperate to understand them, but I wasn’t sure if I could. 


I wrote this in my journal while sitting in the grand foyer of Skywalker Ranch, staring out the 50-foot-tall window overlooking cows grazing on the hill, waiting to meet their afterlife on this evening's dinner plates.
Flowing steadily into my ears in that moment was the ambient music of Brian Eno. In the face of thoughts and insecurities that would have once thrown me into a cycle of self-pity and despair, it was a force that turned these familiar emotions into something hopeful. The music was bright and peaceful, illuminating dark and confusing spaces emotions.

Before I thought, “my family would hate this 'ambient stuff'”: just a random collection of screeching sound without words. What I believed was 'aesthetic' they would often call fluff. But there, reveling in the priviledged irony of watching doomed kobe cows roam over grassy hills, Brian Eno's sounds washing over me, I realized that they're right: 


This music stuff: it's a soft and slightly opaque cushion between my thoughts and the sharp edges of my subconscious, allowing me to crawl deeper into introspection than I ever had before. Beauty serves a purpose. Aesthetic matters - fluff matters: 



Brian Eno created wonderful things by falling serendipitously through the world of infinite musical possibilities, releasing everything except the core idea that he could develop a new niche within it: that he could make music for creative people in creative spaces.

And he did. He made music that taught me transformation doesn't mean abandonment. His ambient sounds reshape the familiar into something new without losing its essence. He helped me see that the friction of my past isn't disconnection, but a sign that it's still standing next to my present, rubbing shoulders with new ideas. If you run away from your past, you won’t feel anything.

My family isn't to be discounted or looked down on because of occasional discomfort from our differences. That tension is just another kind of music, a complex harmony of old and new.

Listen closely and you can hear it all: The nostalgic drone of my grandmother who became a mother to her 4 siblings as a teenager. The fluttering keys of my grandpa who had the strength to try again, and again, and again to build his own businesses and livelihoods after leaving the army with nothing. The chords of my father who escaped an abusive household without ever compromising his dreams of becoming a pilot, something he would finally achieve after 30 years as a mechanic. The central melody of my mother, who instilled in me the value of education, and loves me despite my intellectual evolution becoming increasingly frivolous within the context of the life she has known. The distant reverbs of my brother who, before succumbing to the patterns of the past, lived as a mischievous, athletic, kind, shy, teenage boy.

I hope one day that I have my own studio to play Brian Eno in, but until then, I have this playlist to listen to out of my laptop speakers while sitting at the desk in the corner of my room in my San Franciscan apartment. Though I know I will never create such a great work of art as the 10-acre pine-tree grove planted deep in the mountains of Appalachia, every day I'm pulling new ideas from the soil of it.