Why I Release a New Song Every New Year's Day
Every year, without exception, I release a new piece of music on January 1st.
No album cycle. No press run. No particular strategy behind the timing beyond the timing itself. Just a single piece of music, made quietly and released into the first hours of a new year, for anyone who wants to start the day with something intentional.
I've been doing it long enough now that people expect it. I get messages in late December — are you putting something out on New Year's? What's coming this year? — which still surprises me a little, in the best way. The idea that a ritual I started for entirely personal reasons has become something other people look forward to and build into their own New Year's Day is one of the things I'm most quietly proud of about this project.
But I should tell you where it actually came from. Because it didn't start as an artistic statement. It started as survival.
What January 1st Used to Mean
For a long time, New Year's Day was the hardest day of the year.
I've been sober for over eleven years now. Early sobriety has a particular relationship with the calendar — certain days carry a weight they don't carry for everyone else. Holidays especially. New Year's Eve, with its built-in permission to drink, with its cultural script about excess and celebration and letting go, was a night that required active navigation. And New Year's Day — the morning after, the first day of whatever was supposed to be different — that day had a particular texture to it. Heavy with the pressure of beginning again. Loaded with the question of whether this year would be the one where things actually changed.
Recovery teaches you, slowly and not always gently, that the calendar is not as powerful as you give it credit for. That change doesn't happen because a number rolls over. That the version of yourself you're trying to become doesn't materialize because you wrote a resolution on a piece of paper and meant it very sincerely at the time.
What it does teach you — if you're paying attention, and sobriety has a way of making you pay attention — is the difference between a resolution and an intention.
Resolutions vs. Intentions
A resolution is a declaration. I will do this. I will stop doing that. It lives in the future tense, in the gap between who you are and who you think you should be, and it carries with it the implicit possibility — the near-certainty, statistically speaking — of failure.
An intention is different. An intention is a direction, not a destination. It's not I will be this by December 31st. It's I am orienting myself toward this. I am pointing myself in this direction and I am going to keep doing that, imperfectly and with interruptions, for as long as it matters.
The distinction sounds subtle. It isn't. One sets you up to fail and feel bad about it. The other invites you to begin again, as many times as necessary, without the accumulated weight of every previous attempt.
The music I release on January 1st is always built around this idea. Not a fanfare. Not a countdown. Not the kind of energy that announces a fresh start and implies that whatever came before was insufficient.
Just a breath. A single sustained note of beginning. Something that says: here we are, in the first quiet hours of a new year, and that is already enough.
How Light, Again Came to Be the Name
The 2026 edition of the tradition is called Light, Again.
That title is doing a few things at once that I want to unpack, because I chose every word of it carefully.
Light — not as a metaphor for happiness or success or any of the things we're culturally pressured to optimize for in January. Light as in illumination. As in what happens when you stop bracing against the dark and let your eyes adjust. As in the particular quality of a January morning when the sun comes back a few minutes earlier than the day before and you notice it, and it means something.
Again — because this is not the first time. The light has come before. It will come again. It always comes again. The tradition itself is built into the word: this is one iteration of something that repeats, that has always repeated, that will go on repeating long after any particular year becomes relevant.
Again also carries something about renewal that feels more honest to me than newness. I am not a new person on January 1st. I am the same person I was on December 31st, with all the same accumulated history and habits and ongoing projects and unresolved questions. But something is being offered — by the calendar, by the light, by the act of making and releasing a piece of music into the first morning — and I want to receive it. I want to be present for it.
That's what Again means. Not starting over. Continuing, with intention.
Why I Make It Rather Than Just Listen to It
People sometimes ask why I release music on New Year's Day rather than just putting on a playlist and observing the occasion quietly, the way most people do.
The honest answer is that making something is how I show up for things that matter to me.
I am a sound designer and a mixer by trade — my professional life is spent in service of other people's creative visions, which I love and which I'm good at. Six Missing is the place where the creative impulse is entirely mine. No brief, no client, no deliverable. Just whatever needs to come out and whatever form it wants to take.
Releasing something on January 1st is an act of commitment to that. A declaration — not a resolution, note — that this work matters, that this practice continues, that I am still here making things for reasons that have nothing to do with metrics or timing or whether the algorithm thinks it's a good release window.
It's also an offering. I make it and I put it out into the world and I don't know exactly who will find it or what they'll do with it. Someone somewhere will be listening to it alone in a quiet house while the rest of the world sleeps off the night before. Someone will put it on during a long drive to visit family. Someone will hear it and feel, for a few minutes, that the year beginning outside their window is something worth moving toward.
I find that idea genuinely moving. That a piece of music made in a studio in Austin on some ordinary Tuesday in December will be someone else's first sound of a new year.
That's the tradition. That's why it continues.
What Intention Actually Looks Like in Practice
I want to say one more thing about intentions, because I think the word gets softened into something passive — a wish, a hope, a vague leaning-toward — that isn't quite what I mean.
An intention is active. It requires attention. It means checking in regularly with what you said you were orienting yourself toward and asking honestly whether your days reflect that. It means being willing to course-correct without drama when they don't. It means holding the direction loosely enough that life can happen inside it, but firmly enough that the direction still means something.
Eleven years of sobriety is, among many other things, an eleven-year practice of intention. Of waking up each day and orienting toward a version of life that I chose, that I keep choosing, that doesn't maintain itself automatically.
The music I make on January 1st is a small version of that. A single morning's worth of orientation. A sound that says: this is where I'm pointing. This is the quality of attention I want to bring to the year ahead.
Light, again. Every time.
