Newport Beach

In November 2022, I was invited to Newport Beach, LA, for the world premiere of my piece Tupelo Poems [2017], by the acclaimed group the Choral Arts Initiative. I was just a 22-year-old nobody when I wrote it, so despite having met a few choral superstars at the time, no one was interested in performing the music of a poor kid from rural Louisiana, spending his summers in a trailer house and mopping floors at a laundromat. It wasn’t until six years later that I developed enough social currency and saved enough money to travel to Los Angeles and network enough to ensure the piece’s premiere.

Newport Beach is a wealthy town— a level of wealth that feels alien to me. It was surreal to have my “poor-kid music” performed there. These photos convey my feelings as I moved around the space: gratitude, envy, admiration, shame, and the constant sense of being an outsider— merely a temporary observer of this wealth before I must return home to the grind.

I wrote a blog post about the conflict I felt on that trip. Read it here.