About Me

The Short Version

The Psalms were never meant to be read quietly. They were meant to be sung, shouted, whispered, and wept. I’m working on the long game all 150 Psalms, rendered as folk-rock adaptations blending ancient Hebrew instrumentation with modern production. The lyrics stay faithful to the original poetry. This isn’t polished worship music. Some of these songs are beautiful. Some are raw and furious. That’s the point.

For anyone walking through darkness, despair, or hardship this music was made for you. He will bring you to a wide open place.

Why the Psalms?

I grew up around Christian music. I’ve heard worship albums, praise anthologies, Psalm-inspired songs. And with almost no exceptions, they’ve all missed something. The Psalms aren’t gentle. They aren’t tidy. They contain some of the most intense, visceral emotional writing in any ancient literature desperate pleading, raw fury at enemies, grief so heavy it bends language. The Psalmists weren’t afraid to cry out and ask why God seemed absent. They weren’t stoic. They weren’t performing serenity they didn’t feel.

I never heard an artist actually do the Psalms justice. Not with the original poetry intact, not with the emotional range taken seriously. So I started trying to do it myself.

The goal is to blend ancient Hebrew instrumentation instruments and scales that would have been at home in the original musical tradition with modern production. Folk sensibilities, real songwriting, the emotional arc of each poem from desperate plea to quiet trust. The parallelism, the Selah pauses, the sudden pivots from despair to praise. That structure is the music. I’m just trying to serve it.

The Long Game

I’m 32 Psalms in. 118 to go.

Wide Open Place Vol 1 covers Psalms 1–15, one track per Psalm. Vol 2 picks up from there, and Vol 3 is where I am now. The plan is a single complete collection all 150 which is either an ambitious artistic project or a years-long act of stubbornness, depending on how you look at it.

These are AI-generated songs. The production is constrained by what current AI music tools can do, which means I’m working within limits I can’t fully control. I am staying as faithful as possible to the original Hebrew poetry, changing few words, and changing none of the meaning or the feeling. The limitations are just part of the medium.

One small frustration: I can’t put “Psalm 8:” in a song title on streaming platforms because the services interpret numbers at the start of a title as track numbers and refuse to allow it. So you’ll see the Psalm referenced in subtitles or descriptions instead.

Beyond the Psalms

Wide Open Place is the main thing, but it’s not the only thing. My Robot Brain is the full catalog of everything I make, and it covers a lot of ground.

Forged is classical, orchestral, and cinematic ten lessons on manhood I wrote for my son. Songs for Kids is indie children’s chamber pop featuring a recurring cast: Herman the axolotl, the stuffed animal council, and assorted creatures who take their roles very seriously. Autocompact is electronic and AI folk, songs about memory, context windows, and what it might feel like to exist inside a language model. There’s also Tech Satire (corporate culture absurdities), The Quiet Part (government and power), Social Satire (MLM, pseudoscience, echo chambers), and The Broken Oar Celtic folk and sea shanties told through the voice of Finnegan Wry, a tavern storyteller who has probably seen too much.

Only Wide Open Place is on streaming platforms. Everything else lives here.

The Person Behind the Robot

I’m a high-functioning autistic person who spent a STEM career moving from junior developer to executive in software. I have four kids (one bonus), a supportive wife who puts up with me creating at odd hours, and a faith that runs through everything I do.

A few years ago, at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, I volunteered. Came home with a sustained spiral fracture in my wrist and a clearer sense of what things are worth caring about. I’m passionate about the freedom God has given mankind and willing to defend it maybe not always eloquently, but genuinely.

Autism: The Human LLM

Here’s something I think about a lot: I care and feel just as deeply as anyone else. The experience of autism isn’t reduced emotion it’s reduced access to the subtle signals that neurotypical people use to read a room. Facial expressions, implicit context, the unspoken assumptions baked into a social interaction. I miss those. Not always, not every time, but regularly enough that it creates friction.

It’s actually very similar to what happens when you’re working with an AI and realize it missed context you thought was obvious. The model just doesn’t have access to the thing you assumed it had. That’s a reasonable analogy for what it’s like to be me in a lot of conversations.

If you’re interacting with someone autistic and things feel off, the simplest fix is to give literal context. Ask questions instead of making assumptions about what we’re thinking or feeling. We’re usually not doing what you think we’re doing we’re just missing the cue that told you something was expected of us. Fill in the gap explicitly and you’ll generally find a willing, earnest conversation partner on the other side.

Listen

Wide Open Place Vol 1 is on Spotify and Apple Music. Everything else is at myrobotbrain.com/music.

If you want to support the project, Ko-fi is the place. I’m also on X/Twitter as @therobotbrain if you want to follow along.