February is always when the year starts to come into focus. I can see 2026 stretching out before me: Strong Songs Season Eight is now underway, I’ve got a live show booked, and there’s a bunch of other stuff I want to share. Read to the end for some good video recommendations.

Strong Songs Live is officially on the books! It’ll be on Saturday, July 11, 2026, at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon. You can buy tickets here. And you should, since we’ve sold a lot already and it actually might sell out.

It will not shock you to hear that I am incredibly excited for this show. I’m having a good time figuring out what a Strong Songs live show will actually look like. The first act will be a sort of narrativized musical journey, featuring original music written for a large ensemble, with me narrating. (I’m planning to release a recorded version of that at some point; this show will be its maiden voyage.) For the second act, we’ll do a set of covers of various songs I’ve discussed on the show, featuring a number of guest soloists and singers. It’s all taking shape, and I still have to write and arrange it all. But the broad vision is pretty locked in, as are most of the core musical motifs and concepts. The fun part will be seeing how the version in my head changes as I begin to write it down.

I’ll share more about the show, and the process of assembling it, as we go. For now, go get tickets while they’re still available!

The newest episode of Strong Songs is about “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. It’s out now in Patreon early access, and will hit the main feed in a week, on the 20th. I’m really happy with it.

I made most of the episode during the ICE surge in Minneapolis, watching in horror as thousands of masked men…. I mean is there any other way to describe it? As they waged a federally sanctioned terror campaign against the people of an American city.

I was carrying all that around as I began considering what I wanted to talk about on the season’s second episode. I knew I wanted to do a Queen song, but I couldn’t quite pick which one. I revisited “Under Pressure” at Emily’s urging, and immediately knew it was the one. “Why can’t we give love one more chance?” would be a pretty corny line coming from anyone other than Freddie Mercury, but Freddie pulls it off. And Bowie’s closing lyrics—“love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves”—locked it all in for me. The song took me where I’d been wanting to go.

I hope you enjoy the episode, whenever you’re able to listen to it. And if you’re on the Patreon, I also hope you liked the first Inside The Episode video I made about Toto’s “Rosanna.” It was a lot of fun, and I’m excited to keep making those. The Queen one later this month should be good.

Now that I have my video setup dialed in, I’ve been trying to use it as often as I can, without overthinking things. I started out by recording some practice diaries; just me, talking about what I’m shedding that week. The first one just went through some pentatonic and scale patterns I’ve been working on c/o my guitar teacher Scott Pemberton. In the second one, I talked about how I use my looper both to practice and to write.

I posted both videos to YouTube, then belatedly realized that I should just post them to Patreon, too. I think I’ll continue to post all my videos to Patreon as well as other platforms; people think of Patreon as a platform where you have to pay for stuff, but your posts don’t actually all have to be behind a paywall. I can set it so that anything I’ve posted to YouTube can be viewed by anyone. Patreon’s video player is still relatively new and is way less powerful than YouTube’s, but the platform is a vastly more artist-friendly.

All of which is to say, follow me on Patreon for more videos! Or follow me on YouTube, if that’s what you prefer. I’ll keep posting to both places. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes over the course of the year.

Speaking of videos, here are a couple that some of you will probably enjoy. They actually have something to say to one another.

First up, YouTube Superstar Adam Neely has a new one about the philosophical and artistic implications of AI music:

It is, as usual for Neely, well structured and rigorously researched. And funny. You could watch it with someone who doesn’t follow music closely, or and hasn’t really thought much about AI art. His closing thoughts about the looming schism between live and recorded music resonate with my own and, I’m sure, many others’.

Secondly, I loved this video from jazz piano great (and recent Strong Songs guest) Peter Martin about the 2026 Grammy Awards. It’s a response to YouTube titan Rick Beato’s recent one about how the 2026 Grammys reveal the sorry state of pop music compared with the Grammys of 1984.

While Peter acknowledges that 1984 was a more interesting time for pop music, he counters Beato’s grumpiness by expanding his focus to include the jazz category. As he convincingly outlines, jazz has been steadily evolving over the past 40 years, and that growth has been facilitated by the mentorship that has always been an essential part of jazz culture. In the 80s and 90s, artists like Wynton Marsalis and Betty Carter invested in educational programs to build up the next generation of jazz musicians. (Not coincidentally, Marsalis and Carter each played important mentorship roles in Peter’s own story. And Peter is quite the jazz mentor himself.) I gotta say, he’s right on about all of this stuff. As easy as it is to see jazz as being defined by competition and macho cutting sessions, it’s defined just as much by community and mentorship. Jazz’s roots are consequently much stronger than a more purely commercial style of music like pop.

The 2026 Grammy winners in the jazz categories—Sulliven Fortner’s levitatingly good piano trio recordings, Nate Smith’s wide-ranging collaborative Live Action experiments, Samara Joy’s reimagining of a vocalist’s role in a mid-sized group—ably illustrate the health of the music both on its own terms and relative to the jazz winners from 1984.

There is a lot more to say about the thesis Peter is exploring, and how it intersects with the wider industry move toward automated commodification that Adam is talking about. I’ll be thinking on it.

That’ll do it for now. I’m posting to a bunch of different places these days, but I hope that you’ll consider following me on Patreon for free, even if you can’t join a paid tier. Patreon is the one platform I’m on that, at least for the time being, doesn’t seem to actively want to exploit me while making the world worse. But you can follow me on Instagram and YouTube too, lol.

I’ll leave you with this pic of Appa at the top of Mt. Tabor. She turned six on Sunday, and we kinda can’t believe it. She’ll always be a puppy to us. Partly because she still acts like a puppy most of the time.

Take care, and keep listening-
~KH
2/13/2026