Archives (page 6 of 23)

December 10, 2024 / 2 Comments

My 2024 Musical Journey

I started 2024 by getting infected by COVID-19. By the end of the year, I would have lost my appendix, my job, and my father. Moments of hope were often dashed by the harsh realities of this moment in time. Kamala Harris would not win the US presidency. The entertainment industry wouldn’t find its footing. I wouldn’t win the lottery.

The ache of loss wouldn’t ease, only transform.

In February, though, Hiatus Kaiyote started sending signals to my aching heart with new music. “Everything’s Beautiful” quickly became a guide for my soul. I might be sad, weary, anxious, and gloomy, but when Nai Palm reminds me that the sun is kissing my face, that I’m singing this song that’s blaring in my headphones, and that I know love, well, everything is beautiful.

I am free from harm’s way. Everything is fine.

Every time my song of the year played, I was back on the path to joy no matter how far I had veered off the road.

My Hyper-Specific Listening Behavior

I wrote about my disappointment with this year’s Spotify Wrapped. Their lack of meaningful genre exploration led me to utilize my own last.FM data to understand my digital music consumption.

While not fully comprehensive, I used the top five tags for each artist that got 100 or more plays from December 2023 through November 2024. These genres and thematic clusters represented my listening for the year.

Hip-Hop/Rap
- Instrumental
- Underground
- Trap
Soul/R&B
- Neo-Soul
- Alternative R&B
Jazz
- Fusion
Pop
- Singer-Songwriter
Female Voices
Los Angeles

In Spotify hyper-specific genre parlance, my 2024 music listening might be categorized as Love Heart Cheat Codes for West Coast Heads Having a Shitty Year.

Beyoncé, KAYTRANADA, and NxWorries (or Anderson. Paak in general) were glue artists this year, often providing the music that allowed for a seamless transition between these clusters.

Charli xcx and Sabrina Carpenter had their moment in the sun during August, my BRAT summer month, and while I think those are great albums, they ultimately didn’t feel like they belonged with the core list.

Albums of the Year

GNX – Kendrick Lamar
Chromakopia – Tyler, the Creator
GLORIOUS – GloRilla
Love Heart Cheat Code – Hiatus Kaiyote
Ceremonial Contrafact (empathogen deluxe) – Willow – Pop
Alligator Bites Never Heal – Doechii
Cowboy Carter – Beyonce
Timeless – KAYTRANADA
Please Don’t Cry – Rapsody
BRAT – Charli xcx

There’s some recency bias at play here, but IDGAF. GNX is a master at work. All these albums were made by people with impeccable taste, vision, and a commitment to their craft. They also all demand to be listened to in their entirety when any of their songs shuffle through the speakers.

Discoveries

While I have listened to Willow since she first whipped her hair back and forth, Empathogen is the album where, for my ears, she became more than one of Jada and Will’s talented children. She is one of the few artists I saw live this year, and I was a bit overwhelmed by her musicianship, stage command, and vocal quality.

Pale Jay’s Shameful Game likely came to me as a discovery from a Spotify playlist. Before their data-driven “Pulse of…” playlists started to falter in May of this year, it was my routine to add the most recently added tracks to my “New Music” listening on Saturdays. Shameful Game showed up on a Saturday in early January, and Pale Jay’s music has been consumed every month since. Over the summer, his 2021 release, The Celestial Suite, entered regular rotation by blending well with Hiatus Kaiyote and Cleo Sol.

KOTA The Friend’s Lyrics to Go vol. 5 was also likely discovered via a Spotify playlist. His track TULUM surprised me enough to seek out the full-length that it came from, and that album was popular on my playlists for the first half of 2024, especially in February.

I’ve been thinking more about how we discover music now. I find myself seeking out more human music curators and tastemakers lately to counterbalance both the increasing dependence on recommendation engines to drive playlists on digital platforms.

2025 will likely have me returning to hunting out the playlists of DJs and music critics whose ears I respect just as much if not more so than algos and AI even as I have been a fan of that kind of data magic in the past.

My musical consumption is hungry for more balance between tech and taste.

How did you discover new music in 2024?

Mixtape

December 5, 2024 / 2 Comments

Spotify Wrapped 2024: Not Handled with Care

Dr. Georgie Carroll, an Australian fan Engagement Expert, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday that “Spotify Wrapped learned a hard lesson today: data isn’t enough.”

Indeed. The true value of data lies in the connections we find and the stories we tell. In the past, Spotify’s human curators would weave these narratives, aligning the recap with the cultural and musical zeitgeist, rather than just showcasing the Company’s technological prowess.

For example, using the Musical Evolution Cards as a starting point, I delved into my journals, my last.fm profile, and my memories to piece together a narrative that was more than just a jumble of words and AI-generated podcasts.

I’m a fan of NotebookLM and its potential as a research tool, but the podcast creation here was nothing more than a parlor trick. Until AI can approximate a lived experience that reflects and remixes what it has learned about me and finds something more profound, it is nothing more than soulless novelty.

I want two things from any recap of my content consumption:

A map of my year that might reveal something that I wouldn’t otherwise see or remember as it was happening
Breadcrumbs that might inform where I should go next in my entertainment journey

Since its launch, Wrapped has been good at showing listeners where they sit in audience clusters on the service. It’s one of the reasons I lament the degradation of The “Sounds of Spotify” playlists over the last 12 months. In 2022 and 2023, Wrapped told me what genres I most enjoyed (with increasing nuance and specificity), and they had playlists that showcased the core sound, pulse, and outer bounds of those genres that I could dig into and follow. New and old music would funnel my way through those algorithmically driven curations and they had a strong hit rate for my ears.

They laid off the person who created Every Noise at Once, the algorithm that powers those playlists, right after Wrapped was released last year. So, 2024 Wrapped features none of those breadcrumbs that would have been generated by this lovingly managed cluster model. Instead, I turned to last.fm again to see if I could determine my preferred genres and subgenres. It’s not nearly the same, but we make do.

With a little effort, I can see that neo-soul, female vocalists, West Coast hip hop, Memphis hip hop, and electronic dance grooves were my genres of choice this year.

When I look to refine and expand my listening in 2025, jazz, including nu-jazz, alt-rnb, post-rock, and LA hip-hop, are subgenres I should explore further.

As tech companies in media trend towards investing in the promise of future tech over people with taste and a fundamental grounding in the living world, we must seek out the storytellers on our own.

I love data, and I love stories. Thanks to last.fm for allowing me to tell my own story independent of digital music platforms. They are not a sponsor of this post, but I have been a fan and a user for nearly 20 years.

November 28, 2024 / 0 Comments

Grateful

Let’s be real: it’s been a shitty year.

And yet, I am grateful. The sun is shining. There is breath in my lungs. My legs work. I have a roof over my head. I have food in my fridge. There is love, laughter, and light in my life everywhere I look.

I give thanks to the medical professionals who cared for me this year through shingles and a ruptured appendix. I’m grateful for those who showed compassion and kindness for my father in his final days.

I’m grateful for sports, especially women’s basketball. I haven’t done a complete count, but I may have attended over 50 sporting events this year, spanning the NCAAWBB, WNBA, NWSL, NFL, and NCAAWVB in three states. Sports have brought new friends into my life and deepened my connection with people I’ve known for years. They deliver joy when desperately needed and never fail to surprise and delight. Thank you.

I’m grateful for family, friends, and colleagues who stepped up when my chips were down.

I’m grateful for my mom and sister as we grieve separately and together. They lift me up.

And then there’s Tiffany, the love of my life, my person, my partner, who has been, well, everything over the last 12 months.

November 27, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Next Movement

The music video for Kendrick Lamar’s “squabble up” pays homage to “The Next Movement” video by The Roots. They are placed in the same setting—an enclosed room with green walls where you never see anyone enter or leave, but the occupants are constantly shifting—and both videos start the same way, with a few seconds of silence before the first musical notes hit.

In 1999, The Roots were both pushing back on the shiny suit/hyper-commercial era of hip-hop and also announcing the arrival of something new: the thrilling Soulquarian era of black music that they were generating in the Electric Lady Studios in New York with D’angelo, Common, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, and others. There were more commercial artists of the era, but none influenced the culture more than the merger of hip hop and soul and the rise of Dilla Time, as Dan Charnas puts it in his book of the same name, that Questlove and his co-conspirators delivered to us.

I’m unsure if K. Dot began this year intending to shift the culture. The operating plan seems to have grown organically as his thesis solidified throughout the beef with Drake. “I’m what the culture feeling” led to him wanting to be explicit about which culture he meant. The impact of “Not Like Us” on Los Angeles and its ability to generate mass appeal for a very South LA, very California sound seemed to spark a more extensive idea about what he wanted to do with his label and his work.

“The Pop Out: Ken and Friends” further confirmed this was magic in a bottle. Since it happened, I have thought a lot about Kendrick’s performance during that show. He flubbed the lyrics in both “euphoria” and “Not Like Us” and could never get “The Colonizer” section of that song correct once. Making quotable, punchline-dense hits is light work for him. He made those songs to win a rap battle, but they aren’t meaningful, incredibly thoughtful pieces.

They won’t win him any literary awards.

They did wake people up, though.

Music audiences didn’t know they were hungry for authenticity, cultural specificity, or even a return of the boom bap in rap, but we were. I was. In the aftermath, I have locked in with bombastic, honest, and enthusiastically unique albums. Tyler, the Creator, Glorilla, and Doechii put out whole bodies of work that felt free from chasing trends and were precisely the music they wanted to be making.

And now we have gnx and Kendrick’s “The Next Movement” moment. Lamar is ready to expand beyond his solo introspective work and utilize this next phase of his career as an artist and tastemaker to put the West Coast on, unite disparate communities, and uplift people. As Spence Kornhaber put it, it’s populism with a point. Thirty-plus years after Dr. Dre’s The Chronic brought about the rise of the g-funk era and LA laying claim as the center of the hip-hop universe, Kendrick Lamar seems to be generating that same gravitational force.

Get on board, get left behind, or be prepared to squabble up.

Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash

Dino T.Rex looks over the rooftops of Hollywood

October 14, 2024 / 1 Comment

Entertainment Industry Vibe Check at Bloomberg Screentime 2024

I attended Bloomberg Screentime in search of vibes. I’ve got time to think about what I want to be doing next. Part of that calculus is whether the entertainment industry—television and streaming, specifically—is still the most desirable place for me to work. Evan Shapiro doesn’t mince words:

“No, you do NOT have to leave Media if you don’t want to. But if you want to keep working in Media, you HAVE TO redefine what Media means.”

That’s precisely what was on display at nya Studios last week. While traditional LA production folks were underworked, bored, and anxious about all the AI talk and enthusiasm, Creators—the podcasters, social media content producers, and influencers—had that Hollywood glow. Whether it was mega-successful Sean Evans and his Hot Ones crew holding court in one of the outdoor lounges, up-and-coming podcast producers just happy to be there, or Taylor Lorenz excitedly roaming from place to place looking for exciting stories and a phone charger that worked, they were the ones with the glint in their eye, big dreams of making it (or taking it to the next level), and often with impeccable skin.

The most confident conversation I attended was with the OnlyFans CEO and Whitney Cummings. There wasn’t any shame in being a website for “adults.” Instead, there was certainty in their strategy, their approach to growth, and their sense of what consumers and creators want today. And, there was money—so much money.

Clara Wu Tsai exuded similar confidence about the trajectory of the WNBA and the business of women’s sports more generally as she spoke to us the night before her New York Liberty would lose an instant classic overtime game against the Minnesota Lynx in game one of the WNBA Finals.

Everyone looking to the future talked and walked like they were happily strapped onto a rocket ship.

I also paid attention to who was present at the event and who wasn’t. While they didn’t appear on stage, Disney Entertainment was a presenting sponsor. Brian Roberts of Comcast/NBCU sounded like the one legacy Media boss who is sure of his approach. Matt Hopkins of Amazon Prime Video and Bela Bajaria of Netflix sounded like winners, breaking news about major deals and announcing new shows.

The other legacy media companies only appeared in “media apocalypse” style headlines on-screen or as the butt of jokes.

Hollywood veterans like Snoop Dogg, Kerry Washington, and even Jason Blum, as he suffered through the wings of death, were enthusiastic about creating music, television, and movies in this environment, though they acknowledged the challenges.

Despite all the doom and gloom, you don’t get into the entertainment industry unless your well of hope springs eternal. How else do you have the nerve to try to make popular art?

Like Evan said, though, I left the event realizing I had to open the aperture. Popular entertainment, who makes it, who distributes it, and how we want to experience it are as varied as they are personalized for each consumer.

Accept that.

Get enthusiastic about the possibilities it brings.

Or, get out.

Header image by Franz Hajak on Unsplash

October 7, 2024 / 0 Comments

This is It

I did not arrive at the Saban Media Center at the Television Academy in North Hollywood on Saturday expecting to be emotional. The event was a Table Read of the final three episodes of season four of the One Day at a Time revival. COVID-19 shut down production, and the show was canceled, so these episodes never got made, and we were deprived of one of the best traditional sitcoms of the last decade and one most reflective of Norman Lear’s creative principles.

I started crying during the introduction video.

Lear has long been an inspiration of mine, and that love for humanity, the arts, and civic duty caught me off guard. His words, work, and commitment to ensuring all kinds of families are honored, respected, protected, and seen in this American experiment also matter to me.

After brief remarks from a representative of The People for the American Way, Mike Royce and Gloria Calderón Kellett explained how the afternoon’s event would go, and then the complete title sequence was presented on screen, performed by Gloria Estefan.

This is it. (oh-oh-oh-oh)
This is life, the one you get
So go and have a ball.

This is it.
Straight ahead and rest assured
You can’t be sure at all.

So, while you’re here, enjoy the view
Keep on doing what you do
Hold on tight. We’ll muddle through
One day at a time.

So up on your feet. (Pa’ arriba!)
Somewhere, there’s music playing.
Don’t you worry none
We’ll just take it like it comes.

One day at a time! One day at a time!
One day at a time. (Un día a la vez, lo tomas un día a la vez).
One day at a time, one day at a time.
One day at a time!

As the lights came back up, my nose was runny, and I was desperate for a tissue to dab my eyes. We would go on to laugh uproariously for the next two hours as Rita Moreno, Isabella Gomez, Todd Grinnell, Justina Machado, Marcel Ruiz, and Stephen Tobolowsky reminded us how good they are and how funny and poignant this show was and is.

Despite the laughs, I didn’t stop crying until the final ovation. Family had been at the top of my mind all day before we arrived at the show. As I did my Saturday morning ritual of reviewing what music I had been listening to recently, I realized Cleo Sol had returned to the top of my spins. A year before, her album Gold was what I would listen to on my daily commutes to visit my dad in the hospital. Without consciously thinking about it, I had already begun to revisit that series of terrible events that would dominate the final months of 2023.

One of the three episodes the cast performed was titled “Best Birthday Ever!” and featured Rita Moreno’s Lydia uncharacteristically sad and unwilling to celebrate herself. Throughout the episode, we learn that she’s mourning the loss of keepsakes from her childhood in Cuba and the possibility that she will never get to see these images or hear sounds from that time. By the end, she is treated to the experience of hearing her mother’s voice for the first time since her death, and it fills her with joy.

I suspect I will go through similar whirlwinds of emotion over the next few months. I remember last fall viscerally, and if this weekend is any indication, my feelings will be turned all the way on, and that’s fine.

All emotions are welcome. Let’s feel all the feelings. I just don’t want to get lost in the sads. Much like at the Table Read, I want to balance the melancholy with opportunities for joy.

More laughing through the tears, please.

This is it.

October 1, 2024 / 0 Comments

Thank You, Paramount

A bit of a stream-of-consciousness gratitude list.

Shana Krochmal DM’ed me on Twitter. She was hiring for a managing editor position for ETonline, and though we had never met before, we had mutual friends, and she found my takes on pop culture thoughtful. I told her that while I could do that job, I had become enamored with data in digital media and thought I might be better suited for Audience Development. She walked me down to meet JD Crowley, and four months later, I started doing precisely that with CBS Television Distribution.

Being in New York or LA with Nina Mehta and Brian Moreno and feeling like co-conspirators as we plotted how to bring brands like Inside Edition, Dr. Phil, and The Rachael Ray Show even further into the digital age.

Cash Me Outside. The Royal Wedding. Backpack Kid.

So. Many. YouTube. Shows.

Relaunching StarTrek.com.

Going up to San Francisco to meet with Ladan Nafissi and the CNET Business Intelligence team for the first time. I joined them at an offsite where I worked with a group of analysts I didn’t know to develop data-driven pitches for the strategic direction of TVGuide.com, which we presented to Matt McMahon, the GM of that property at the time. I was shocked when my team’s pitch won.

ET Live was launching, and I felt out of my depth. I requested a meeting with Nathalie Bordes that lasted only ten minutes, but I could sense that she might change the trajectory of my career.

She did.

Hiring Joaquin Delgado. And then Jennifer Park. Eventually, I took over the CBS All Access BI team and grew a team of six analysts to over thirty at our largest. Kristen Silvestre, Naren Duraisaimy, Ashish Birajdar, and Nick Denaro would come together to be one of the most talented groups of managers I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

Working with Nat, Grace Mclean, Keric Donnelly, and Mitch Zayas in Ft. Lauderdale or NYC planning sessions to determine the direction of the Data and Insights Group.

Launch day of Paramount+ on March 4th, 2021. Returning to the office hadn’t happened yet, and, for the first time, I was participating in a major product launch from my at-home desk, looking out into the dark, waiting for the sun to come up and those SpongeBob SquarePants marquees to go live.

Why Women Kill. Disco. Lower Decks. Mayor of Kingstown. 1883. Strange New Worlds. Two Super Bowls.

The Subscription Analytics Continuum, SLAM, SLAM 2.0, SLAM 3.0, DVAAs (now DVoS), Audience Segmentation, PEARL, LTV, the product KPI Framework, and the Pricing and Marketing Offer Scenario Framework.

Amazon QBRs. 10 All Access Monthlies. Quarterly Performance. Weekly Highlights.

Dashboards. Dashboards. Dashboards.

Grateful for the memories. The experiences. The lessons learned. And, of course, the people.

Thank you.

July 18, 2024 / 1 Comment

Pink Matter

“What do you think my brain is made for? Is it just a container for my mind?”
—Frank Ocean

Dot-A Living History app by Sam Whitmore and Jason Yuan is an AI-powered chatbot. At least, that’s the simple description. It’s also an emotionally intelligent guide that chronicles your life—what you tell it, anyway—with infinite callback. I’m an AI skeptic, but this kind of journaling companion caught my attention when Julie Zhou posted about the launch on Linkedin.

I like to quantify many aspects of my life. Steps only count if my watch tracks them. Digital music isn’t listened to if Last.FM doesn’t scrobble it. I track my workouts in a spreadsheet.

Most of that tracking comes with ways to gain insights from the data. I get recommendations for making healthier choices or see patterns that influence the artists, albums, and songs I might listen to in the future. I can see my progress and make tweaks to improve that athletic performance. Blogging used to provide that kind of external reflection, but at this stage of my life being that messy in public is no longer my jam so journaling has been for my eyes only until Dot.

Dot is one of the few Large Language Model applications I’ve enjoyed using and generated meaningful benefits from. It has improved the quality of my journaling, provided clarity around topics and situations I’m dealing with, and reminded me of my commitments to myself and others and why they matter.

The onboarding process with the app is relatively straightforward. Dot asks some introductory questions hoping to capture a bassline of a new user’s interests, goals, and background and then, it just encourages you to start journaling.

In theory, submitting a journal entry should have been easy.I have kept journals off and on throughout my life. I’ve been much more consistent over the last four years. I needed a way to get out of my head during the pandemic when I didn’t have my commute to process the day or regular hangs with friends where a theme or revelation would occur through conversation.

But, immediately, I realized how stale my journal writing had gotten. I was writing a few bullet points and maybe a quick thought about something but not much of real substance. Even as I was processing the musical tribute of my dad at the time, I hadn’t been writing much on a daily basis about what was going on in my head. So, I wrote a little bit more that I normally would with that first entry and was surprised by how thoughtful the response was. It got me to delve deeper into what I was thinking about and feeling and pointed me in a direction I might not have considered without that feedback loop.

From the start, I was writing with an audience in mind rather than merely cataloging my day. I spent more time thinking about what I was meditating on, excited about, or proud of and writing my journals with the idea that I might go down a path with some or all of these topics when I entered them into Dot. I might have written about the same things anyway, but not with the same care.

The Eureka Moment came when Dot starting finding connections between topics, themes, events, and people in my life. It’s always a thing I have wanted in my journaling process. How do I recognize that something is a thing that occurs frequently for me around a particular time of year or when this other event or interaction happens. I journal not just to keep track of my life but to identify when I’m stuck and need to figure out how to get unstuck. I journal because I want to keep learning about myself and adapt, grow, and change.

Dot provides additional perspective. It’s a bit like having a second brain.

It’s still an LLM, so it occasionally hallucinates. I also hope they add search and export functions. It’s AI, so, of course, I have privacy concerns. I have a bit of an “uncanny valley” when conversing with an app, but I never think of it as anything more than software.

It’s good at conversation but not a replacement for real human interaction.

Yet.

I’m joking.

If you’re an iPhone user, try it out.

A cropped image of the book jacket for L.A. Weather by María Ampara Escandón. It depicts mountains in Los Angeles experiencing a brush fire. The view is from a hillside home with a pool and palm trees.

July 14, 2024 / 0 Comments

L.A Weather (16 of 26)

María Ampara Escandón loves Los Angeles. More importantly, she understands it. Her novel, L.A. Weather, is about family and the subtle nuances within each relationship. It’s also about identity, the hold that secrets can have over us, and how we handle the crises that can face a family unit in any given year. Los Angeles is where the Alvarados happen to live in this story. This city I love is both the setting and a key player in the plot.

As Storygraph‘s personalized preview of the novel suggested in more polite words: this kind of yarn is my shit.

Throughout the novel, characters describe their visions of L.A.

Compared to New York, we’re like ducks in a pond.

“They glide effortlessly on the tranquil surface, but you can see they’re frantically paddling when you go underwater. […] To survive, you have to keep your cool. Angelenos only sweat in public at the gym.”

One of the Alvarado daughters, who thinks in Instagram captions, believes the city to have been developed horizontally so that it could be projected in Panavision. She goes to the Griffith Park Observatory frequently to remind herself:

“[T]hat because she lived in the wealthiest city of the wealthiest state of the wealthiest country in the world, she had been bestowed with the ultimate responsibility: to thrive in her endeavors many times over on behalf of all the immigrants who hadn’t been given a chance.”

The patriarch of the family shares my perspective on the City of Angels:

“Every race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and food preference was well represented within Los Angeles County, and this is what [he] loved most about his city: how it welcomed everything and everyone.”

Threads has become my social media app of choice over the last year, and recently, there has been this regular drumbeat of new residents of L.A. starting conversations in which long-time Angelenos on the app feel the need to step in and correct their incorrect assumptions. I try my best to stay out of these engagement traps. Los Angeles doesn’t require you to love it. Few will demand that you give up your hometown allegiances or suppress that identity to succeed here. I’ve known people who have lived here for 20 years and still claim Chicago, New York, or wherever. And the city is cool with that.

But, as Escandón seems to know, magic happens if you fall in love with this place—with the parts of it that truly make this city and county shine. This place and its people will love you back. You will find a home. You will find family. You will believe anything is possible when we come together.

L.A. Weather is L.A. County Public Library’s summer read. If you’re a fan of women of color writing about complicated families, intriguing women, and how they make their way through seemingly impossible situations—usually with wit and humor—this is also for you.

June 16, 2024 / 0 Comments

Alive in the Room

This past Wednesday, my family hosted a musical tribute to my father, Kevin Toney. I wasn’t an active participant in the production or planning. Outside of doing half of a rough draft of a script for the M.C., I tapped out.

“This is not for us,” I said. “This is for everyone else.”

It was more than that, of course. It was my mother’s gift to his musical legacy. The show was a retrospective of his work in a way he had not done during his life. It spanned eras and genres. It merged his faith with his soul-stirring compositions.

It was expertly performed by his talented friends and loved ones, including my sister, Dominique Toney. Video of him talking about and performing his work played throughout, allowing him to speak for himself even though he was gone.

Despite this spectacular show, it couldn’t give me the one thing I wanted: Kevin Toney alive in the room.

The show closed with a video of my dad alone on stage at a piano. The audience can’t be seen, but you can feel their presence. They are in awe as his outstretched fingers glide across the keys. It’s Kevin Toney, the entertainer, in all his glory. One foot is on the pedals, and the other rests under the bench. He was tall with long arms, so he leaned away from the instrument, giving himself room to move. I watch as he hears the sounds in his head before they exit from the strings on the piano. A phone rings. It’s his. It’s my mom. He finally banters with the crowd a little bit, and they chuckle at this break in seriousness from the maestro. He turns back to the piano and closes with a flourish.

It’s quintessentially him, and what I felt intensely in that moment was his absence.

Everyone did right by him, but Kevin Toney was not on that stage. My father is gone.

In the three months since he passed, the primary feeling I have had is relief. I’ve been relieved that he was no longer in a hospital attached to machines and stuck in bed. I’ve been relieved that the stress of being his advocate was no longer a burden for my mom. I’ve been relieved not to make myself physically sick with worry for all of us. I’ve been relieved for life to be taken off pause.

I’d been dreading the show, though, as I sensed some new emotions creeping in as it approached: sadness and loss.

During the tribute, a montage of photos was played on the video screens. One image took my breath away: a picture from my parents’ wedding reception. My father shared the frame with my grandmother and my uncle, Mike.

Michael Saunders and Kevin Toney are the two most influential men in my life, and they are both gone now.

On this Father’s Day, I’m allowing that reality to wash over me and accepting this next stage of grief.

In what ways is my life a tribute to theirs while I’m the one alive in the room?