The Rabbit Hole

I used to spend a lot more time making covers for YouTube, and I've never really wanted that side of what I do to completely disappear.

I also spend a lot of time around musicians who will happily start picking bluegrass and folk songs between sets if you give them the chance.

So this felt like a fun way to bring those two worlds together.

Six songs I already love, rebuilt a little more acoustic, uplifting and somewhere between bluegrass, folk and pop.

And if a few of them eventually sneak into the live show...

I wouldn't be mad about it.

I've never been particularly good at figuring out which box I'm supposed to fit into.

Apparently my songs aren't either.

Some of these go all the way back to 2015. Others I've written in the last few years. They don't all sound the same, they weren't made at the same time, and trying to make them fit neatly into one little category wasn't really working.

So I stopped trying.

Wrong Sized Box is basically one big box filled with a bunch of smaller, differently shaped boxes.

Maybe the box isn't the problem.

Maybe I just need more room.

WAITING

I wrote this one around 2024 with a pretty simple theory:

I think the era of hitting on girls might be over.

At this point, my best move is probably just making you comfortable enough to decide what you want to do.

So that's Waiting.

I'm not making the move.

I'm waiting on you.

It’s lived in my live set for a while. In 2027, it finally gets its pop version.

8 songs.

Harlie and I have known each other for years and somehow never really sat down to write together.

Then Mavry came into the picture, the three of us got in a room, and Houdini appeared.

The idea started with a guy who's always looking for the next score. He gets caught, somehow slips out of it, and immediately starts looking for the next one.

He never really learns.

He's just very good at disappearing.

I get to play that character for a few minutes.

Musically, it's rhythmic, funky, soulful and has a little Michael Jackson in its DNA.

If you liked the world Revelations lived in, you might like where this one is going.

Not the Britney song.

This one's mine.

It's about a very specific type of girl I apparently have a soft spot for.

Salt lamp. Snake plant. Sun, moon and stars. Big feelings. Probably knows what Mercury is doing right now.

I love it.

It's also probably not great for me.

Then again, I keep showing up, so maybe I'm part of the problem.

Toxic has been living in the Chaz Mazzota Live world for a while.

In 2027, it finally gets its proper pop release.

Five boom-bap hip-hop songs built a little like actual Mad Libs.

We leave spaces open on purpose. Write something. Freestyle. Jump in with us at a show. See what happens.

There’s a lot of music in Nashville. We figured there could be a little more room for hip-hop too.

We met a songwriter from California at Artist Night and invited her back to write with us. Somewhere between Taco Bell and getting to the studio, Nashville went under a tornado watch.

Being from California, she was understandably a little less comfortable with that than the rest of us. She eventually headed home before the storm.

The storm never came.

We went downstairs and wrote Tornado Lover instead.

So I guess the night worked out.

One umbrella over the whole 2026 season: all twenty-four songs from the official tracklist, in his order.

Nine of these songs also live inside their own projects further down the hole. Those rows carry the project's name; tap one to jump to its home chamber.

U Play + I Stay, live at Levitt AMP Lawrenceburg on June 15, 2026, played with the Blue House Band.

Lori is one of the few people who can bring me a song that already somehow sounds like something I’d say.

He brought this one in, I started singing all over it, and somewhere along the way it became Be My Baby.

We shot the video back home running around downtown, getting ice cream and hanging out by the old dock.

Nothing too complicated. I think that’s why I like it.

We wrote Higher years ago, went our separate ways, and somehow both kept playing it.

Four years later, we came back to finish it and realized we’d been hearing two completely different versions of the same song.

So we made both.

Higher

is softer, acoustic and lets the weight of the song sit for a while.

Higher (Flip Side)

is brighter, bigger and built for driving with the windows down.

Same song. Depends how you want to feel it.

One of the first co-writes I did after moving to Nashville.

Brittany and I wrote it around 2019, played it here and there, worked on plenty of other things over the years and somehow never actually released it.

Until now.

We finally got back together, grabbed some friends and shot the video on a playground.

Apparently this one just needed a little time to find its way out.

I was supposed to just be helping Southpaw produce this one.

Then I listened to it on the way to a birthday party. By the time we got there, I had a verse.

I parked, looked at him and basically said, “I think I’m on this song now.”

We later shot the video at Burgess Falls, got asked to leave the trail and I managed to twist my ankle somewhere along the way.

Still like the song.

This started at a writing camp and went from an idea to a finished record surprisingly fast.

The concept was basically: what if Revelation happened from the zombies’ perspective?

They were perfectly comfortable resting. Everybody keeps waking them up.

Fine. They’re getting up.

Somewhere along the way the music video gained dancers, masks, choreography, rain and a lot more moving pieces than I originally planned.

I’m glad it did.

Lori and I have been making music together for a long time, and eventually we realized we had enough songs living in the same world to give them a home.

Seven songs, a few appearances from Luke and Hew G, and two older friends you might recognize: Meet Her and Last Time.

A little hip-hop. A lot of personality.

Welcome to Valet.

Everyone seemed to have an opinion about AI.

I figured I should actually use it before deciding what mine was.

So this became an experiment.

AI, acoustic guitars, electric guitar, programming, loops, things I played, things I changed, things I kept and things that surprised me.

Not really human versus machine.

More like figuring out what happens when they make something together.

We already made Champagne.

Then we wondered what would happen if we slowed it down, loosened everything up and let it live somewhere a little jazzier.

Apparently Champagne cleans up pretty well.

These two songs actually started around the same time in my life, way back around 2018.

Moment eventually found its way out in 2023. Paralyzed took a little longer.

They share some of the same sounds, feelings and pieces of where my head was back then, so eventually it felt right to put them back together.

Somebody can be a little intoxicating sometimes.

Take a sip. See where you end up.

Eddie and I went to Hawaii after working together for about a year and a half without ever really stopping to celebrate what we’d been building.

When we got home, we wanted to keep a little piece of that feeling. So we made Hawaii.

Then I accidentally deleted the entire project folder.

Thankfully I had a bounced demo and some newer tools that helped me rebuild what I’d lost.

Eddie and I eventually ran around downtown Nashville in Lilo & Stitch onesies for the video.

Somehow that feels about right.

I’d wanted to make something with Hew for a long time.

I was playing around with some newer production tools and chasing this nostalgic feeling when Old School finally showed up.

This was the first one I made where I thought:

Yeah. Send him this one.

He was in.

The song eventually found another home on A.Little Assist too.

Kevin was my original music partner and one of the people who was there near the beginning of all of this.

We lost him in 2025.

I couldn’t make it home for his funeral, so I recorded the vocal for Brother that day instead.

I never wanted to make the song bigger than what it was.

It was just something I needed to make for somebody who meant a lot to me.

Lori and I have collected some remarkably similar dating stories over the years.

We won’t tell you exactly what happened.

We will tell you that neither of us received particularly glowing reviews of the experience.

So we wrote Meet Her.

I hope you never have to meet her.

Lori is one of my oldest friends and one of my favorite people to write with.

He also somehow makes me feel cooler just by being around him.

We wrote Last Time during one of his Nashville trips and knew there was still a piece missing. So we sent it to Hew.

He heard it, jumped in, and by Lori’s next visit the three of us were running around the Nashville Zoo together shooting a music video.

Just as planned.

More or less.

I wrote this one a few years before it actually came out and always loved the little syncopated pop pocket it lived in.

Then Eddie and I went to Hawaii.

I vlogged the whole trip and somewhere afterward realized I’d basically already shot the music video.

Hawaii. A little pop song.

Just say you like me.

Luke and I had already made a few things together by this point, and Champagne was one of those songs that came together because we were just having fun with it.

It’s bubbly, playful and really not trying to be anything more complicated than that.

So naturally, we put a bunch of friends on a party bus and made that the music video.

Good people, a moving bus and probably more champagne than we needed.

Sometimes the idea really can just be that simple.

The Chappell Roan song, covered once and posted on Valentine's Day 2025, in the middle of the Be My Baby season.

Danielle once told me nobody had ever written a song with her name in it.

That seemed fixable.

In my head, this song has always looked like a sad little Eeyore-type elephant meeting a ridiculously social bumblebee who pulls him back out into the world.

It’s not really about falling in love. More about meeting somebody who lets you be whoever you are right now, without much expectation of who you were before.

Sometimes somebody just brings a little life back into your day.

Thank you, Danielle.

I had a bunch of songs I’d been carrying around and wanted a way to finally record them that felt connected to how I actually perform.

So we invited friends and family into the studio, brought in the Blue House Band, set up eight cameras and recorded 12 songs with a live audience.

All in one take.

It was definitely one of those ideas where halfway through setting everything up I wondered why I’d made it so complicated.

But that was also kind of the point.

It captured the band, the songs and the people around me at that moment in a way a normal studio album probably couldn’t have.

It also became my first real physical CD, which I still hand out all the time.

I’ll admit this one started with a little bit of spite.

An old relationship, a song from the other side, and maybe a couple little jabs being sent through the music.

Good Times was my response, but I didn’t really want to throw another jab back. It became more of a tip of the hat.

Whatever happened between us, I’d still take the good times.

My friends and I ended up traveling to see the 2024 solar eclipse and turned the trip into the music video.

Funny where a song can take you.

Luke and I were already starting to figure out how much fun we had making things together, and Blame It gave us an excuse to play around a little.

It started as a flip of Jamie Foxx’s Blame It, then we mixed in some original writing and a little Buy U a Drank by T-Pain along the way.

It lives somewhere between a cover, a flip and something of our own.

Technically, you could probably call it a parody.

We don’t really call it that.

One December night in 2024 at Nelson's Green Brier Distillery in Nashville, five songs were taped live: early hearings of Finding Me and Higher, RyTE, the live debut of break, and a cover of Toxic.

I’d been working with the Blue House Band for about a year and wanted something that actually sounded like what we did together at a show.

So we recorded Dancing in the Moonlight, Valerie and I Like Me Better.

Simple arrangements. Simple vocals. Basically just us playing the songs the way we would live.

We made it easy.

Hence the very sophisticated title.

This is where Luke Jenison enters the Rabbit Hole.

Luke originally reached out because he wanted me to sing on a song he’d written. I wasn’t completely sold at first. It wasn’t my melody or my lyrics, and I wasn’t sure if it felt like me.

Then he sent me his idea for the music video.

That got me.

It was my first real glimpse into how Luke thinks creatively, and I wanted to see where we could take it.

One song turned into more music, video projects, business projects and eventually a really good friendship.

You’ll see him again down here.

I actually wrote this one around 2018.

It just took me about five years to figure out what to do with it.

Moment lives a little deeper than some of my other songs: love, loss, life and everything that gets tangled together between them.

It was also one of the first times I felt like I’d really found a contemporary pop sound that fit me.

I still really love this one.

Two covers from the quiet stretch at the top of 2023.

A REAVES song, covered with Bella Raye and posted May 15, 2023.

The short clips they made together that fall live out on the branch.

This was me leaning pretty intentionally into electronic pop.

I was listening to a lot of Quinn XCII and writing about what my actual lifestyle and headspace looked like at the time.

Keep your head on straight. Be honest. Help people when you can. Maybe don’t work quite so hard.

I’m still working on that last one.

Three live tapes from 2022.

Best and Break were never released as records. They exist as live repertoire, and these tapes are where they live.

Sixteen covers from 2022, the year the cover machine restarted after the album years.