Anthony Dean-Harris

I have a tendency to fly by the seat of my pants. My whole career has gone this way, galavanting from one landing pad to the next logically sound landing plan. I consider it to some degree being led by God's providence, and that is the reassurance that moves me through life, but it's still to some degree finding the most sound notion of flying by the seat of my pants. There's more foresight than this, but not much. I'm not the one who makes the structure here. I can only see maybe two or three moves ahead on the chessboard. I've never been a particularly good chess player. I'm 17 months in on my move to Portland, where I uprooted my life in San Antonio in the pursuit of making music the main drive of my life considering it's been a central thread of it largely throughout it. It's a fight, and I anticipated as much. It's an adjustment, and I anticipated as much. I've lived an interesting and varied life filled with an assortment of experiences tha...

I've been in Portland for a little over six and a half months, testing all the waters, getting all the sealegs. Nothing quite enforces the idea of radio being the medium all about the now with a job where everything changes so constantly. It's been a bubble unto itself that gets to isolate me to some degree from everything else in the world, and for that I'm entirely grateful. Nothing has stayed the same from month to month and I'm rolling with the tide and trying, in all things, to slow down. My time at KMHD gave me the time and ability to pull off something I realized I haven't done in nine years-- write a longread travelogue about a music festival. I'm forever haunted by projects I've failed to complete about travels past like heists gone wrong-- Montreal, New Orleans. I cherish my loving ramblings, my verbal snapshots of moments long past-- cold, expensive New York the first time around ; the most professionally fulfilling week I've ever felt in swee...

It happened the way one would expect it to happen in a movie. I'm a middle-aged man with a particular set of skills, renowned in certain corners but technically on the outs, when I got a call out of the blue about a life-changing opportunity where I'd uproot my life for a shot at the brass ring, even if it has its own complications. Of course, if this were a movie, the call would have been a guy flying in on a helicopter and landing in the park across the street from my previous home in San Antonio, with my boss walking up my long driveway, taking off his sunglasses, hair tousled in the wind, and starting with "You're a hard man to find", but a phone call out of the blue also sufficed. Last year around this time, I was stuck in a rut. I had gotten the job I thought I wanted managing the adorable hot spring bath house resort/craft beer & wine bar on the Southside of San Antonio, Texas, that my landlord spent years dreaming into reality. People found it charming...

Some time last year, I finally bit the bullet and got a streaming service. I wailed and moaned for years about how they screw over the artist by paying a pittance to them, how they commodify music, how they work you over in every possible way. Then one day, I found myself having to DJ at a gallery opening and ended up having to use Spotify for some reason and it clicked. I understood the allure, the freedom of having just about any song you need just about any time you need it. The process began and I started to break down. Of course, I knew I wouldn't go with the great grifter that is Spotify, so like with all major endeavors I take on, I researched for a while for the fairest streaming service with the best library for the best value and ended up going with Tidal, much to the chagrin of anyone who follows my Instagram stories (or to the integration with my Android operating phone, unable to use voice commands to play a song at will because I guess Jay Z didn't get the contrac...