It’s hard to know where to start here. But if I had to start somewhere, there's a sociological term I learned at a young age that has been omnipresent in my life. The term is “third culture kid”. According to a compilation of information on Merriam-Webster about the subject, the term was coined by the American sociologist Ruth Useem while studying the dynamics of expatriates living in India. The third culture, per this Merriam-Webster compilation, is defined as “the mixed identity that a child assumes, influenced both by their parents' culture and the culture in which they are raised.” You might be asking, “why is this folk/country songwriter from south Texas rambling on about the third culture?” Well the answer is, I am a third culture kid.

I was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1992. The son of a father who was a pediatric dentist born and raised in San Antonio, and a mother who came from a long line of trail drivers and cattle ranchers in south-central Texas. At age 6, my family moved from the small town of Pleasanton, Texas, to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, for what was supposed to be a year-long stint. However, that soon turned into a decade. In the midst of that, we took a brief year-long hiatus from the Middle East in Landstuhl, Germany, where my father contracted for the US armed forces.

To this day, as a 33-year-old still slogging it out as a songwriter in Austin, Texas, that period of life has defined who I am as a person (whether I like it or not). My time growing up in the Middle East gave me the privilege of traveling around the globe and seeing how other folks lived. It gifted a small-town, south Texas boy with the nuances of a global perspective. I’m grateful I grew up in an international curriculum with friends from all over the world, just as much as I grew up in the cattle pens or along the fencelines alongside my cousins and friends in the hot Texas summers.

While attending the University of Texas at Austin, I majored in Geography. Landforms, maps, climates, cultures…they are the things, in my opinion, that have allowed me to find my voice as a songwriter. So while at times I feel college was not for me and perhaps a waste of time, I believe it actually gave me the final chapter of vocabulary to thoroughly describe the people and places I’ve loved and known.

Whether it be the caliche dust of a ranch road in south Texas, or the sand of the djebels and dunes I traversed on my way to the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia, an old rancher telling stories about my great grandpa, or a bedouin in the Rub al-Khali welcoming us into his tent with a hot meal and cup of tea, it was all the same just as much as it was different. I hope these places, whether you know them or not, can be known through the songs of my new record.

For a long time, all of this stuff I’ve been blabbering about was a source of difficulty in terms of understanding my place in the world, and especially, in the world of music. It’s been a long, winding journey to find my voice as a songwriter. I feel I finally put the two worlds together in the natural way I’ve been working towards on my latest record. Frankly, it feels like a spiritual bowel movement in the best possible way. And I feel much better now.

photo of James Steinle by Marshall Tidrick.