[The long version]

Craig’s first memory of playing music was on a brass bugle—which was in fact merely an ornament his mother purchased for a few dollars at a department store. But he would hum and hum into it, filling the house with the glorious melodies of mid-80s television shows. Craig was born in 1979 and raised in Travelers Rest, SC—at the time a hotbed of cultural inactivity. An odd child and hyper-self-aware, at age 4 he came in last in an Easter egg hunt because he refused to run, seeing how the other kids ran weirdly and wanted to “check himself out” before running in public. (Later he would be the fastest in his elementary school in the 50-yard dash, and is still waiting on the plaque.) Craig was an artist first and loved the challenge of drawing faces and figures, primarily Superman, Michael Jordan, and other superheroes. When his musical interest outgrew the decorative bugle, he joined the sixth grade band and was naturally drawn to the trumpet. Years later as a junior in high school, Craig signed up for guitar class hoping to learn chord structure and music theory. He did not. But he did fall in love with guitar and writing songs and soon started a band with friends, who fortunately exposed him to the music of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Jeff Buckley, Ben Harper, Nina Simone, and the likes.

Subsequent pivotal moments are as follows:

• Craig went on to study trumpet performance at Yale School of Music, but still writing songs and performing in New Haven coffee shops and frequenting the renowned open mic venue The Space.

• While in grad school, he bought a classical guitar for $100 from a local shop and learned a fingerpicking style from a fellow student and Dylan devotee. He then signed up for classical guitar lessons in addition to trumpet and piano lessons.

• After graduating from Yale with no actual skills, he lived in NYC bouncing around between few temp gigs and even fewer trumpet gigs.

• To make ends meet, he learned to roast coffee and worked as head roaster for West End Coffee in SC for the better part of a decade.

• Inspired to revisit his love of art, Craig learned to paint with oil and draw with charcoal, soon acquiring a studio and taking portrait commissions.

• Discontent with his lyric writing, feeling it was contrived and affected, he took several years off from writing before discovering Joanna Newsom, whose style opened him up to an entirely new approach—one not unlike painting.

• In 2017, at age 38, Craig released his debut album Blue Metropolis, a thick, busy, horn-heavy work that he describes as a portrait of a city, inspired by his time in NYC.

• On November 1, 2024, Craig released a new album Entropy in Six Dimensions, conceived as a nearly continuous work of 9 songs for voice and guitar.

Craig is rather quiet on social media and generally does not care much to update others on his life. He doesn’t want or need the attention. While this might be detrimental to his ambitions as a musician and artist, it is liberating as a human person seeking a peaceful mind.