I'm interested in exploring the creative process through photography.
How does an idea become a song? How does a song become a recording? How does that recording make its way to the stage?
That's why I created Studio to Stage, an ongoing project for Static & Blur, the Bay Area music website I co-founded.
I might spend a week with a band at one of the Bay Area’s many great recording studios or an afternoon in a band's garage, wherever a song is being written, recorded, mixed, or figured out.
Until that song or EP or album is released and finally performed live.
For Alvie & The Breakfast Pigs, that was nearly a three year process. In November of 2023, the band went to 25th Street Recording in Oakland with about fifteen songs and a budget to record about five of them. The plan was to release the songs as singles about six weeks apart.
It didn't work out that way.
Life happened. Jobs were lost. Schedules changed. The songs evolved. The fifth and final single, “We Want Change,” released in September 2026.
That long road became part of the story.
When I caught up with Alvie Adams two days before the final release, we talked about the recording process, songwriting, the realities of making music while holding down a day job, and what it means to keep making rock music in San Francisco.
That's what Studio to Stage was meant to capture.
Not just the finished song or the finished photograph, but the people and the creative process behind them.
The Bay Area has a long and important musical history. A lot of people are still fixated on the music that happened here sixty years ago. There's music being made here right now and not enough people know about it.
Read the full Studio to Stage feature on Alvie & The Breakfast Pigs and view all of my photographs from the project on Static & Blur.
Studio to Stage is an ongoing project. Where music is being made, there's a story to be told.
