Welcome To Kuz On Music (Part 1: Music)

Hey there, Kuz here. This site is the home to my creative work, a place to share my music, photos and websites I've designed along with my thoughts on being an artist in these wild, uncertain times. Jack White once said, “Music is sacred,” and I believe that to be an absolute truth. Music connects us through time, cultures and lived experiences. Creativity is being threatened by AI and a lack of consideration for artists and people who work to get to the heart of the human experience. I hope that this site allows you to connect to my creative work and inspires you to create, share and experience art, music, photography and whatever else brings you joy.

I'm organizing the site into distinct sections for Music / Photography / Website Design  along with a Blog to document my work, thoughts, travels and more!

I'll keep you updated on social media via instagram, so give @kuz_on_music a follow if you haven't already :) Here's my most recent work in each category to kick off my first blog post!

MUSIC

I released a new tune, "Ginger Stone", on June 26, 2026.

Listen to Philosopher Pirate's “Ginger Stone” here: https://tr.ee/juOtav62Gx

This song began as a writing exercise prompt in Blake Mills School of Song songwriting class. It was a warm-up exercise on the first day of class, January 4, which just happened to be my born day. A stick figure was shown and we were asked to give it a name and some details to create a character. This songwriting class is virtual and Blake Mills, being the badass musician and producer he is, had a ton of people attending, so the stick figure was shown close to a thousand people. As they were typing in names and details for this random stick figure, I scrolled up in the chat and saw two different names typed one after the other.

Ginger. Stone. 

This immediately got my creative juices flowing and I said to myself, “That's a song title.” My next instinct was to write a line.

"Ginger Stone won't answer the phone." 

And there, the song was born. My mind went to California. My mind went to The Beatle's “She's Leaving Home.” My mind went to a person deciding to leave their past behind to start a new life. Like Tom Petty's muse, she belongs among the wildflowers.

The song came quick and my band, Philosopher Pirate, debuted it at Twin Lights Brewing on January 31. It was then developed and tweaked and ready to record in April. We recorded at Silver Horse Studios in Union City, NJ, which is run by my bandmate and good buddy John Roccesano (Roc) who recorded, mixed and co-produced the tune. My band — Roc on drums, Jonathan Andrew on bass and Nick Porcaro on guitar — recorded the basic tracks live and felt like we got the take after running it three or four times. We then focused on backing vocals with Jonathan and Nick coming up with their parts and we recorded them to finish out the day's work.

Roc and I then spent a couple of sessions getting the lead vocals takes and adding synth, piano and organ parts. We finalized the mix and sent the tune off to Bill Skibbe at Third Man Mastering to finalize the song. I've worked with Bill on most of my releases and had a chance to interview him for The Latest Noise. Bill has worked on some incredible albums as a recording and mixing engineer over the years including a ton of White Stripes and Jack White releases. You can check out my interview with him here.

For visuals, I wanted to do something unique that captured the spirit of the song. Kaitlyn Monteiro is an incredible collage artist (and girlfriend!) whom I gave some general direction to include a phone, a window looking out to the world. She sent a bunch of variations, all of which were exciting, and I felt like they could work. After some back and forth, we decided on a simple layout with a red phone, a window and a photo that I took in San Francisco back in 2023.

Original Photo taken in San Francisco on 8/18/23

Thanks for reading! I'll be making two more blog posts in the coming days to cover recent photography and website design so stay tuned and if you like what you've read leave a comment below!