Protected: How to Bomb an Audition
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Life Stories
Reflections on my upbringing, fatherhood, and trying to be a better person.
On 9/11, I Was Brushing My Teeth
That’s what I was doing when I overheard two guys talking in the men’s bathroom in my dorm hall. Aerospace students, dressed smartly with combed hair. “This is huge,” one of them said. I had just turned 20 at the University of North Dakota. After hearing them talk—about what I still wasn’t sure—I walked to
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About Last Night’s Earthquake
August 7, 2025 – Port Vila, Vanuatu My kids and I were on the sectional sofa watching Despicable Me. “Stop moving the couch,” Silas, my oldest, told August, the second-born (not sure why I’m including their birth order). August said he wasn’t shaking it. I told him to turn off the TV. Lorentz (#3) and
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From College Dropout to Career Musician: A Letter to Worried Parents
I couldn’t concentrate in class. I kept thinking about my guitar, lyrics to songs I was working on. I’d daydream about performing in front of thousands. Old high school classmates in the crowd. My junior high crush apologizing for not noticing me: “If I could only go back, Aaron,” she’d say, “I’d do things differently.”
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An Espe Christmas Eve
It’s Christmas Eve, and you’re about seven or eight. Your family has this tradition of opening gifts on the night before Christmas. You’re pretty sure the reason is to convince your young brain that there’s no Santa Claus. How could there be? It’s 9 PM. He hasn’t even hooked up his sleigh yet. Furthermore, your
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The Breakaway: A Hockey Story
I am six years old and a member of the Old Dutch Potato Chips hockey team. We have orange jerseys with big white letters. Aaron Degerness is our star player. Saturday mornings are game days and this particular morning the stars align: I catch the puck and begin a long breakaway the length of the
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Happy Accidents: Where This Picture Came From
I know the lyrics to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” are about West Virginia, the Blue Ridge Mountains and all. But last year, when my wife and I hauled our family around the Midwest in a camper for my Living Room Tour, I took a wrong turn near the Montana/North Dakota border. Though we tried
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Confessions of an Extremely Moderately Successful Singer-Songwriter
I was at the age when all your friends start getting married. It seemed as if every other month I was performing “I Will Be Here” by Steven Curtis Chapman, while a bride and groom lit the unity candle. Their pacing always much faster than rehearsed due to nerves and the unnatural activity of lighting
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How My Cousins Pranked Me at My Own Concert
Most attendees at the Aster Cafe in Minneapolis that night likely thought it was a drunk, oblivious stranger passing by. They weren’t far off. It was my slightly inebriated cousin Erik, doing a dare by his likely much more sober brother Karl. They were only sorry that the shenanigans just so happened to be during
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The Best Day of My Life
You might think the best day of my life would be the day I got married or the birth of any of my kids. You might even think it was the day I signed my first publishing deal or recording contract. Don’t get me wrong, those days were fine and everything. But they simply cannot
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