Brand Story

Empty Rooms and Open Fields

My dad died when I was seven. Farm accident. The only thing I can really remember is that I was entrenched in an episode of Spiderman ‘67 when my grandmother delivered the news.

My mom went back to work. A radio station — 96 Rock. FM. And on Saturdays, she took me with her.

The studios were empty. The hallways were empty. And nobody told me I couldn't touch anything. So I touched everything. Walls of vinyl. Equipment nobody was using. A seven-year-old alone in a room full of other people's voices.

I was looking for something. I didn't know what.

Later that summer, Skylab returned to Earth— July 11, 1979 — I carried a red Radio Shack tape recorder into a wheat field outside Monroe, Ohio. Hundreds of acres. I'd been running an imaginary radio station all summer. Myself as host. The fields as my signal. That day, I decided to broadcast all of it — the heat, the silence, the waiting, reports from several news sources — certain the debris would land close enough to cover. It came down in Western Australia. I was just as happy for the people there who found it.

I was the only one who heard that broadcast. The audience was zero. I didn't care.

My mom kept opening doors. We went to Disney World often — Tomorrowland first, always. We flew to Los Angeles. And one afternoon, in a studio at Watermark Productions — where my Aunt Linda worked, I met the one and only — Casey Kasem. I pressed play when he announced the number one song in America that week.

Little Red Corvette.

I was standing right there.

Back home, the farm never called to me the way it called to others. Not the vocation. But the shapes, the colors, the logos on the equipment. The contrast of it. And one thing I kept coming back to — a quiet barn with a small radio playing country music to nobody. Just playing. Just waiting.

That image never left.

Decades stack. Influences compound. A career spent crafting experiences with two ADDY Awards along the way. But creative work was never the destination. It was the training ground.

The time has come to build worlds people can escape to. A barn that feels like a fever dream. A dance floor that doesn't apologize. A night that starts as a stranger and ends as a story you tell for years. You don't need to know what's coming. You just need to walk through the door.