​SYDNEY, Australia – Two Australian Aboriginal street musicians introduced me to the musical instrumental known as the didgeridoo, and I knew immediately that I had to incorporate it into my music. Its primal growl made me feel like I was being transported back to the beginning of time. 

A hot-air balloon floating gently through blue skies. What could be more peaceful?

​Not much. But getting the balloon in the air – now that’s another story, which happened on a sunny, breezy day last month.

FIRA, Greece – A young street musician earns a few euros in the town of Firá, a city with breathtaking views perched high on the cliffs above the Aegean Sea on the island of Santorini.

One day this summer I woke up and realized I was in South Dakota. Then I remembered the really scary part. I was there on purpose.

​What was it like living in an abandoned New Orleans in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina? Inspired by the emails one New Orleans photographer sent to his evacuated friends, my song “Katrinaville” is an attempt to capture the surreal nature of that moment in history, 

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – While touring the hurricane-torn Lower Ninth Ward here this week, I saw the flooded home of the music legend, Fats Domino, who never moved from the poor neighborhood where he grew up. Friends and fans scrawled a heartfelt goodbye to the man they loved and thought they had lost – "R.I.P Fats, you will be missed" – but as it turns out, Fats survived. 

I remember defying gravity encased in a long titanium-steel tube weighing 90,000 pounds cruising at an altitude of 30,000 feet shoehorned into my pocket-sized seat with a couple hundred of my closest strangers.