The Myndbeatz Journey

The first time I ever attempted freestyle rapping, it worked. It was in a dorm room at Yakima Valley Community College in 1999. I had just graduated from High School, played a season of American Legion Baseball. I signed at Yakima Valley for the opportunity to play basketball and baseball, The Chronic 2001 by Dr. Dre had just dropped and was on constant rotation. Aquemini by Outkast had made big impact on me and Napster had changed everything for all of us. We had access to every artist and any song at all times and we could burn tracks to a mixtape CD's for free. It was a time of souped up Honda sedans, after market 6X9's in the rear and a subwoofer in the trunk.

We hooped, we had house parties, we burned beats onto CD's, played NBA Live, hung in the dorms and sat in cars in the parking lot spitting bars, handing each other the mic and celebrating each other's rhymes.

Upon graduation from Yakima Valley, I arrived a Washington State University on a baseball scholarship and quickly gained a reputation for rhyming for my teammates and friends around campus. On a fateful night I met track star named Ben Hampton who had the gift of beat-boxing. We immediatley went crazy for a couple of hours on a front porch somewhere in Pullman, Washington and from then on we spent every free minute we had recording one-take freestyles over the beats of the day including 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Daz and Kurupt. From there we started making our own beats writing and recording lyrics and even harmonizing choruses, mostly for our own enjoyment.

We wrote about girls, life in pullman, the joy of making music and of course a few songs about the state of the world. We got a song on local radio and snuck our CD's in at every gathering we could. We performed at campus events and I was called on to freestyle on bus rides, in hotels and in locker rooms as my teammates and I traveled the country playing ball. I'll never forget getting on the mic during a dead period before a dinner in front of my 2003 Holiday Bowl Champion football teammates and the entire Texas Longhorn football team as well (yeah, I played football too). In college, I wrote lyrics incessantly and never grew tired of constructing words, rhymes and concepts together and freestyling on my own in my 1989 Honda Prelude outside Streight-Perham dorms on the Wazzu Campus. Harlem World by Ma$e was an all-time favorite album of mine.

After college I signed a free agent baseball contract with the Montreal Expos and received a Mac computer for Christmas before my first Spring Training in 2004. That single machine (which I still have) gave a traveling studio to a traveling man. Over the course of a 5-year professional baseball career I took that computer everywhere I went. This included summers in Vermont, Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Dakota and even Winter Ball Colombia, South America. After retiring and getting married, my wife and I spent a year teaching English in South Korea. Over those 6 years, I wrote and produced nearly 40 songs and countless other beats. Making rap beats, writing lyrics, singing choruses and producing finished songs was a creative outlet I never got tired of. I've never needed others to love my music, I made my music because it because it was the type of music I wanted to listen to.

What I learned during those years was that rhyming words was easy for me, people, including my business partner Zach Penprase, enjoyed listening and I had a lyrical sense of humor that entertained others. People felt my music, the positive messages resonated and they appreciated my work. My music reached some pretty unique corners of the baseball world over the years, I'm proud of that.

Well now I'm a father of 5, and my kids love to request my old music on car rides. It's pretty crazy having your kids recite the lyrics to songs you made in hotel rooms from Greensboro, South Carolina in 2006 to Sincelejo, Colombia in 2009. I love it.

Myndbeatz is the continuation of that journey. It's a more mature take on something I've been doing for 20 years: writing positive messages over beats to create music I want to listen to. More importantly, this is music I wish I'd had when I was battling my own negativity for all those years - something I'll touch on later.

If just one these songs reach one player, coach, father or college kid and help them in one way or another, we will be satisfied. We have a desire to pass down lessons from our valuable experiences and through the magic of the internet, those messages can be created, stored and accessed for all time by anyone who desires to find them. We are excited to contribute to the universe in that way.

Free and Clear.