My fascination with Wes Anderson’s films dates back to my adolescent years. For my taste, no filmmaker has ever used songs in their films so poignantly and created such a unique and singular musical ambiance. There is a "mixtape" aspect to a Wes Anderson playlist: an intimate collection of one’s favorite songs, as if each song was painstakingly curated by combing through used record stores to find the most hip and heartbreaking music yet undiscovered by teenage ears. It evokes the childlike wonder of being immersed in a storybook and taps into the pain of loneliness from being an outsider.

There’s something beautiful about creating a collage of sounds that aren’t supposed to fit together, and yet they form a complex picture of a life with contradictions. It’s that unconventional juxtaposition that drew me to this project and inspired me to explore this music through a new genre: jazz. A mixtape is a personal, intimate reflection of what we want to show others about ourselves, and this album is my own spin on that concept—a journey into my inner life through this collage of meaningful music, in my own voice as a composer and a jazz musician. It’s an album inspired by the songs and media that expressed how I felt in my younger years, but it is not a replication of that media. It’s a series of diary entries, a statement about identity and culture, and an exploration of genre and style.