People ask me how to say it. CÆB. Like Caleb, just cut open. That's kind of the point. If you look close, the whole name Caleb is hiding inside there, and right in the middle of that Æ symbol, there's an L nobody notices at first. I put it there on purpose. I tell people it stands for Legacy, and that's true, but it's not the whole truth. I've never fully explained what that L means, because I don't think it's mine to define for everybody else. Some people hear it and think loss. Some think love. Some think light, or life. Honestly, some days I think all five at once and I'm not lying to any of them. The EP L is where I actually laid it out, if anyone wanted to follow the trail. Four songs, four stages. L is the separation, the fracture, the moment the old identity starts coming apart at the seams. Wait. is exactly what it sounds like, that suspended place between who I used to be and whoever I was turning into, stuck in the middle with nothing solid under my feet. MOF, Man on Fire, is the ugly part, the destructive part, where transformation doesn't feel like growth, it feels like burning something down because you don't know another way through it. And then Present. is what's left standing after all that. After losing, after waiting, after burning. Present is arrival. Not a triumphant one. Just what remains. That's the birth of CÆB, if you want the mythology of it. Not a costume I put on. A name for what's left when everything I thought I was gets stripped away. For a long time my voice felt locked up somewhere I couldn't reach. I spent years as a Security Communications Specialist Supervisor for the State of Nebraska, and now I work as a Security Officer at Methodist Fremont Health. Steady work. Real work. But it's not where the noise in my head got to come out. Music became that place. Songs like Clemency, Crash Test Dummy, those aren't just tracks, they're where memory and addiction and identity get to sit in the open instead of staying locked in my chest. I've sat behind a mic mid livestream, half in tears covering Mr Rattlebone by Matt Maeson, because some songs just get you, they reach in and pull something loose you didn't know was still stuck. And through all of it there's Ava, my oldest daughter, who's shown up holding down my lives, who's watched her dad build these songs from nothing in real time. Fatherhood sits right next to all of this. It's not separate from the music, it's tangled up in it, the same way Caleb is tangled up inside CÆB. CÆB isn't a person you become. It's what's left. And that L in the middle, I still don't fully know what it means. Maybe I never will. Maybe I'll spend my whole career answering it differently every single time somebody asks.