Giving Back to Content Creators

The sheer amount of content that we have access to online is staggering, and much of it is available free-of-charge. Social media platforms. News articles. Podcasts. YouTube videos (for the most part). Blog posts. And so much more. They’re all out there on the web, just waiting for anyone and everyone to consume them without paying a dime.

This is something we’ve come to expect and maybe even to take for granted. But what too many of us fail to recognize is that all of these things that we enjoy are being created by people who devote their time, energy, and resources to making the best content that they can for others to enjoy. Creators pour themselves into making content that is valuable to their audiences, and creating that value is costly. Sure, it may be free for us, the end users, but it isn’t free for those who make it.

The way that the internet has traditionally dealt with this imbalance is by enabling creators to place advertisements in and around their content. Advertisers recognize that quality content attracts attention, and they’re willing to pay money in order to piggyback on that quality and potentially attract some attention from consumers for themselves.

But the ad-supported model that the internet has relied on so heavily for the entirety of its existence has some serious flaws, and those flaws are only becoming more apparent. How much should content creators be compensated? Should advertisers have any control over the content that their brands are associated with? How do those (like YouTube) who bridge the gap between creators and advertisers navigate the differing—and often even conflicting—priorities of the parties involved?

These are difficult questions, and the current system is proving itself inadequate for addressing them. Thus, many creators are seeking alternative forms of funding their projects that rely less on traditional models and more on the people creators care about most: their audiences. Plunging advertising rates and increased content “guidelines” are forcing those who make content online to re-think their strategies and come up with new, creative ways to make a living.

Naturally, the vast majority of internet users are going to be resistant to this sort of change. After all, why would you want to pay money for something that you usually get for free? But the truth is that you are paying every time you access ad-supported content, through the time you spend engaging with advertisements and the data that advertisers gather about you as you browse the web. Online consumers have always paid for their content in this way; now we’re being offered alternatives that protect our privacy and more directly support the creators that we enjoy.

I must admit that as an online content creator myself, I am a little biased. I know the amount of time, effort, money, anguish, sacrifice, and more that goes into the process of making content for the internet, and I’m nowhere near the level of professional content creators who do this sort of thing for a living. (Note: I currently do not monetize any of my online content through ads or any other means.) But as I look over the landscape of the amazing content offered online today from some incredible creators, I can’t help but feel a sense of duty to support those who make the content that enriches my life.

Educational videos that help me understand the world in new ways. Podcasts that amplify voices I would have never heard otherwise. Articles that inform me about events taking place in the world right now. Not to mention software and platforms that allow me to connect with others and conduct my life in deeper, more meaningful ways. All of these things have tangible, real-world value. Who am I to passively consume all of this content and never expect to give anything back?

As I said above, I understand that this is an emerging idea that many will approach with skepticism at best. To be honest, my thoughts on this issue have developed over time and only recently come to any sort of actionable conclusion. But I’ve come to understand that supporting content creators is an important responsibility that I can no longer neglect. What exactly that support looks like will vary drastically at different times and with different people, but I’d like to conclude with just a few ways that you can support online content creators if, like me, you feel convicted to do so:

• consume | On the most basic level, experiencing a creator’s content is the easiest way to support them. Whether it’s reading a blog post, watching a video, listening to a podcast, or whatever else, simply being a part of the audience does help creators in big ways, especially if they still rely on the ad-supported model.
• engage | You know how annoying it is when a YouTuber asks you to like and comment on their video or a podcaster pleads with you to “review us on Apple Podcasts” at the end of each episode? Well, they’re asking you to do that because it really does make a difference. Engagement is a key way for creators to increase discoverability. It’s a way for them to demonstrate that their content has appeal and value. Plus, it’s a fun, easy, and free way to help out someone who’s given you something you really enjoy, and it gives you a chance to offer feedback and constructive criticism, potentially leaving an impact on future content.
• share | Whether you realize it or not, you have a platform. You have influence. There are people within your networks (both online and offline) who value your opinion and are are willing to check out content that you endorse. So if you find something on the internet that really speaks to you or that you find of particular value, tell someone about it. Tweet about it. Text the link to a friend. If it comes up in conversation, let people know where you got your information and how much you enjoy the creator who provided you with it. Your stamp of approval is valuable, and if you love something, why wouldn’t you want others to experience it as well?
• contribute | This is by far the biggest and most difficult step in supporting content creators, but it’s also the one that helps them out the most. Whether it’s pledging to give monthly on Patreon, subscribing to YouTube Red, buying merchandise, or some other means of giving, contributing money to fund a content creator is a profound and impactful way of telling them how much you love their content and giving them the ability to make more of it. It requires a bit of sacrifice on your part, but that sacrifice means the world to the one who receives it, someone who themselves has sacrificed a lot in order to bring you something worthwhile.

Am I saying that you owe money to every person you watch, read, or listen to online? Of course not. Very few people have that kind of means. But most of us have enough to give at least a small amount to the content creators who enrich our lives the most, and I believe that if we want to keep the internet full of interesting, engaging, enriching content, it’s on us to make it possible.

Should I Not Be Concerned?

I’ve recently been reading Shane Claiborne’s book “Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us,” and it’s left me feeling very unsettled and convicted. It also reminded me of a sermon I wrote a couple of years ago from Jonah 4 on the value of human life, so I decided to adapt it into a blog post and share it with you. This isn’t my last word on this issue; it’s honestly more of a starting point. So expect to hear more, and, of course, I’d love to hear your thoughts as well. I hope you find this to be valuable.

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Kelly Gissendaner is dead. I'm sure many of you are aware of her story. In 1997, Kelly convinced her boyfriend to murder her husband on her behalf. She was put on trial and convicted of murder. And now, Kelly Gissendaner is dead. While on death row, Kelly become a completely new person. She found Christ, studied theology, became a spiritual leader to other imprisoned women, and even fostered a penpal relationship with famed theologian Jürgen Moltmann. Kelly's transformation showed countless people the power of Christ's love, grace, and mercy. And yet, despite pleas from Kelly's children, from Moltmann, and from thousands of people who have been affected by Kelly's story, the state of Georgia executed her on September 29, 2015. Kelly Gissendaner is dead.

Kelly's story illustrates an unfortunate truth. We as a society and as individuals pick and choose which human lives we consider valuable and which we don't. Because Kelly was a criminal and specifically a murderer, our society decided that her life no longer had any value—that she had nothing more to contribute to the world—and thus, we killed her. But this isn't the only case where we’ve done something like this. We look at different groups within our world and say, "These lives have value, and these don't." This isn't something we do consciously, and it certainly isn't something we would admit to doing, but we participate in it without even thinking about it. This isn't a new problem.

We see this problem in the story of Jonah. Everybody loves this story. It’s one we hear over and over as children. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and warn them of their impending destruction. Instead, Jonah gets on a boat going the opposite way. Jonah gets swallowed by the fish, has a change of heart, gets thrown up, and fulfills his call to preach to Nineveh. The Ninevites repent and are saved. Happy ending, right?

But there’s one little problem with that cut-and-dry, cute, little children’s story. You see, most tellings of the story of Jonah end with chapter three, but there’s this little section called Jonah 4 tacked to the end, and it’s nowhere close to the happy ending we’ve come to expect from the story of Jonah. Here’s Jonah 4 from the NRSV:

But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

In this chapter, we have to face an unsettling truth about our hero: He isn’t really a hero at all. Despite everything that he’s been through and all of the amazing things he’s seen God do in his life, Jonah still has a serious heart problem. At the beginning of chapter four, Jonah is displeased, and it doesn't take us long to find out why. He says to the Lord, “See, God! I knew this would happen! I knew you’d save those good-for-nothing Ninevites. That’s why I didn’t want to go speak to them in the first place. I knew you were just so kind and gracious and loving, and you just couldn’t resist sparing them. I knew. I knew, I knew it, I knew it!”

Have you ever heard the phrase, “No good deed goes unpunished”? I’m sure that’s kind of how Jonah felt in this moment. After a bit of persuasion, he decided to do what God had told him to do, and now he feels like he's suffering for it. But the truth is that Jonah isn’t suffering at all, unless you count self-inflicted pain as suffering. Jonah has just done something incredible. He’s taken Nineveh, the capital city of the most horrendous nation in the world at his time, and converted it entirely to the worship of Yahweh. This is absolutely amazing, a miracle of epic proportions that Jonah is allowed to be a part of!

And yet, as we see in Jonah 4, he’s displeased with this situation. Why? Because Jonah allows his own bias to blind him from seeing the truth. Jonah makes it clear that he never wanted God to save the Ninevites. His bias against the Ninevites led him to believe that they were unworthy of being alive. He wanted God’s judgment to reign down on them and for them to be killed. And so, when they respond to his message and are saved, Jonah is displeased. He’s so displeased, in fact, that he asks the Lord to end his life right then and there.

Psychology tells us that biases like Jonah’s are rarely (if ever) completely unfounded. In fact, stereotypes usually start as nuggets of truth that are then either misconstrued, misapplied, or both. Jonah’s disdain for Nineveh was based on the reality that the Assyrians were Israel’s harsh and demanding overlords. They were the imperial power of the day, and they had no problem showing it. They demanded tribute from the nations they had conquered, and when Israel eventually decided to stop paying that tribute, they burned Samaria to the ground and dispersed the people of the northern kingdom of Israel among the nations, never to be heard from again.

So yeah, Jonah had a very good reason to dislike Nineveh. The problem came when he allowed his totally legitimate feelings about the nation of Assyria to alter the way he thought about the people of Nineveh and the value of their lives.

Jonah decided that because the Assyrian government and military had caused him and his nation great harm, the entire nation was worthless and deserving of death. No need to take into account the fact that most of the people in Nineveh weren’t soldiers killing Israelites, but simply civilians going about their lives trying to take care of themselves and their families. No need to think about the fact that the Ninevite soldiers were simply following orders and that, given the opportunity, any nation, including Israel, could have been just as ruthless as Assyria. No need to recognize that even the Assyrian king, the man personally responsible for the atrocities committed against Jonah’s nation, was still a person just as much as Jonah was. Jonah dismissed them all as worthless, evil, and unfit to live. “Let them all die,” Jonah thought. “The world will be better off without them.” We even see in Jonah 4 that Jonah goes outside the city to wait and see if maybe God will change his mind and destroy Nineveh after all. But instead, God has a very important lesson in store for him.

As Jonah is waiting to see if the city will be destroyed, God works through nature rather than speaking with Jonah directly. He appoints a plant, a worm, and a scorching wind to help him get through Jonah’s thick skull. First, he has the plant grow up nice and tall so that it can offer Jonah shade from the sun. Jonah likes this. There’s nothing like sitting back in the shade, sipping on some lemonade, and waiting for God to strike down your enemies. At least if Jonah can’t get what he wants, God is providing him with the nice consolation prize of this plant.

But the plant has a very short life-span. That night, God appoints his second agent, a worm, to kill the plant. Some scholars waste a lot of time debating about what kind of plant it was and how exactly a little worm could bring down a whole plant overnight, but for the sake of the story, we’re just going to take it at face value. When Jonah wakes up, the plant is dead, and now there’s a hot wind blowing against him. What was at first a comfortable, casual stakeout has now become not only uncomfortable, but potentially harmful. Jonah begins feeling faint, and once again, he expresses his wish to die.

And now, God is ready to talk again. And not only is he ready to talk, but he’s ready to make his case. Just like Jonah made an argument to God at the beginning of Jonah 4, now God is preparing to make his own argument. He asks Jonah if he’s in the right for being upset about the plant. Jonah says yes. This plant has become a life-or-death matter for him. And then God replies, “You think you’re justified in being upset over this simple plant that you didn’t even grow. It grew up and died in just one day. How much more do I have a right to be concerned for the thousands of people in the city of Nineveh?”

God is making it very clear here: He cares for the people of Nineveh. Even though many of them were responsible for atrocities against God’s people and humanity as a whole. Even though they worshipped idols instead of the one true God. Even though they had become so wicked that they were on the brink of destruction, God still cared for them. Their lives still had value to God. He cared about them so much that he sent Jonah to them in order to change their hearts and save their lives. God is telling Jonah that he cares for all human life, even though Jonah had decided the Ninevites’ lives were invaluable. God values all human life.

God’s statement about his care for the Ninevites, and ultimately for all people, points out the hypocrisy of Jonah’s bias. In the midst of his anger and mixed-up priorities, Jonah has come to consider a plant more valuable than the lives of 120,000 people. 120,000 people created by the hands of God in his image, whose lives God considers important, and Jonah considers them to be of no value. How could Jonah have gotten to this point? It seems unfathomable.

And yet, aren’t we in the same boat as he was? We’re obviously not biased against the Assyrians because they’re long gone by now, but we do have our own sets of biases, and we do allow those biases to affect how we value the lives of other people. They lead us to conclude that some lives simply aren’t of value. We look at criminals and say, “Your actions have rendered you undeserving of life.” We read in the newspaper about homeless people dying of dehydration on the street, and we say, “If only they had made better decisions, maybe they’d be worth something.” We hear about innocent people in Syria being slaughtered by civil war and we say, “That’s not my problem.” Because just like Jonah, we pick and choose which lives we consider to have value and which we don’t, and we do so based on which groups we consider important, most of which are simply the groups that are most like us.

But like Jonah, God is calling us to something more. Because the truth is that God cares for the lives of all people, not just those that we consider important. And when we look past our biases and our topsy-turvy priorities, we see that if every human life is valuable to God, then every human life should be valuable to us as well, not just in a hypothetical way but in a concrete, real-world way. When we walk past people on the street, when we see people on our TV screens, when we read about people on news sites, we must remember that every single person matters to God, and thus, they should matter to us.

The book of Jonah ends with an unanswered question. After his object lesson, God asks Jonah, “Should I not be concerned for the people of Nineveh?” God is challenging Jonah to see the people of Nineveh as valuable to him and thus as having inherent value. God is giving Jonah an opportunity to put his bias and anger aside and accept the people of Nineveh for who they are: people who are beloved and valued by God. God is giving Jonah an opportunity to join him in caring for and valuing each and every human life, because each and every human life has value.

And God is extending that same invitation to us. “Should I not be concerned for the people of Syria?” “Should I not be concerned for the unemployed and impoverished?” “Should I not be concerned for those who have lost their way to the point that they have to be locked away from society?” The answer is yes, God is concerned for those people, and we are called to be, too.

In this day and age, we are constantly bombarded with the issue of how we’re going to value human life. Every day, we have to decide what life is worth to us and which lives are worth something. As we try to navigate these complex issues like abortion, the death penalty, war, prison reform, and even emigration, may we remember the story of Jonah. May we remember God's love for all people. May we remember that every human life has value to God, and may we seek to value each human life in the same way.

I Made a Thing

This weekend, I did something scary and invigorating. I took a thing that I had made, and I shared it with the world. In case you missed the announcement on my social media feeds, I’ve started a tech blog called Prosumable that publishes weekly roundups of the most important technology news people need to know. It’s the product of a lot of planning and hard work, and it may be the most ambitious project I’ve ever taken on. Also, it very nearly didn’t see the light of the day.

A couple of months ago, I was overwhelmed by a massive wave of creativity. I can’t be totally sure where it came from, but I think it might have been my mind’s way of coping with the fact that my educational career was coming to an end. Regardless, I found myself constantly coming up with ideas for things I wanted to write, and I felt like I was going to blow up if I didn’t get some of those ideas out into the world. I interpreted this to mean that I needed to get back into a habit of weekly blogging, and so I did (without making a big deal about it in case I couldn’t keep up). But even as I began crafting and releasing new content each week, I still felt overwhelmed by this creative energy that I just couldn’t shake.

And the more I reflected on it, the more I realized that what I wanted to create was something completely separate from what I had made before. Yes, I love my blog and the flexibility it gives me to share my thoughts about a wide range of topics with the world, but spilling my guts once a week about whatever was on my mind just wasn’t going to be enough. I realized that my interests, which tend to be pretty widespread, were starting to cluster around a few central issues that I was spending most of my free time researching and thinking about. And all of these issues were within the world of technology.

The idea for Prosumable didn’t hit me all that once. It was something that had to sort of build through reflection and refinement. But the more my mind reeled with this creative energy, the more the idea took shape until one day, I realized I had created an entire project in my head that I was absolutely in love with and couldn’t bear to keep contained any longer. And that’s when I decided to make Prosumable, not just as an idea in my head, but as a real thing in the real world.

So I started practicing, and I quickly realized that making something—even something that I love and have a passion for—is much more difficult than dreaming about it. So for the last couple of months, I’ve been researching, collecting tech stories, and practicing synthesizing those stories into articles that are appealing and understandable to people who aren’t as interested in technology as I am. I didn’t just want to bring my dream into reality; I wanted to do it well. And that took time and hard work as I prepared to go public.

When I first started working on Prosumable, I set a launch date of May 20, the first weekend after my graduation. But as that date approached, my enthusiasm gave way to something else: dread. I started talking myself out of it, saying things like, “No one’s going to read that anyway,” and “Much smarter people are doing this much better than you are. Why bother?” Then I considered pushing the date back until I could hone my craft and get it just right. By May 19, I had pretty much decided that the project was dead in the water.

But something about it wouldn’t let go. For whatever reason, I really felt like this was the right thing for me to be doing right now. Am I the most qualified person in the world to be commenting on trends in technology? No. Is the content I’m creating for the site perfect? No. Is sustaining the model I’ve committed myself to going to be easy? No. But for some reason, I felt the need to create this, and depriving myself of that creative outlet and the world of my creation (imperfect as it may be) would just be wrong.

So here I am, and here it is: Prosumable. My new, shiny creation that I almost gave up on at the last minute. I’ve been through the entire emotional spectrum of creating something new, and I’ve come out on the other side enthused, encouraged, and excited about the future. Thank you for letting me share my passion with you, and thank you to everyone who has checked out the site and offered support. This project is still in its infancy, and I can’t wait to form it into something great. I made a thing, it’s a thing that I’ve released into the world, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

What Seminary Taught Me

I finally did it! I graduated from seminary.

Last Friday, after three years and 93 credit-hours of theological study, discussion, and reflection, I walked across the stage and received my Master of Divinity degree. It was a long road that often didn’t seem to have an end, but it was also an amazing learning experience that taught me more than I ever could have possibly imagined. As I’ve been finishing up the last few requirements for my degree, I’ve also been taking some time to think through the big-picture things that I learned while I was in seminary. What better time than now to share them with you?

Theology matters.

When I first came to seminary, I wasn’t totally sure what I believed about a lot of theological issues. Sure, I knew what I had been taught growing up, but as a young adult, I had started to think for myself and find that many things I was taught as a child just didn’t work for me. In college, I spent a lot of time deconstructing those beliefs and examining why I didn’t agree with them, but I hadn’t spent an equal amount of time and energy reconstructing new beliefs.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how much it all mattered. I like to think of myself as an open-minded person, which means I’m averse to saying that any particular view is downright wrong. I can see the strengths in a variety of theological beliefs, and this makes it hard to affirm just one. Before seminary, I sort of functioned with a live-and-let-live mentality. I thought, “If multiple views have value, does it really matter whether I pick one or not?”

But my seminary training has taught me that what I believe does matter. Not only does my theology have practical implications for how I live my life, but it also matters on a less pragmatic level. The truth is that God cares what we think about him, and thus it is our duty to be discerning and to think the right thoughts about theological issues to the best of our abilities. This is not just for ourselves, but ultimately for the glory of God.

I’m not saying I have it all figured out or that anyone who disagrees with me is necessarily wrong. But through the processes of learning and growing that I experienced in seminary, I learned to take an informed stance on theological issues because theology does matter.

Theology is hard.

But figuring out what one should believe is not an easy process. There are a wide range of theological viewpoints available to us. In fact, there are more than I ever could have imagined, and many of the views I studied in seminary were views that I might not have even considered “Christian” before studying them. The truth is that theology is a difficult subject, and it only gets harder the more you learn.

There is no such thing as a perfect system of theological beliefs. No matter what viewpoint one affirms, someone else can always come along and poke holes in it, pointing out issues in the view that someone who adheres to it might never even consider. We have a multitude of theological views because when we study theology, we are trying to understand something that is far beyond human comprehension. The best thing we can do is come up with a system of imperfect metaphors that attempt to explain our experience of God.

And so we have to choose the theological views that make the most sense given our experience, and then we have to live with the problems that inevitably come along with those views. As hard as we might try, we can never explain away every issue that someone might find in our theology. The best we can do is be true to our own convictions and pick the theological solutions with problems that we can live with.

There is room for diversity of thought.

And that is going to look different for different people. Some might be willing to live with theological issues that I simply cannot stand. As someone who takes theology seriously, I am seriously affected by the implications of the beliefs I affirm, and I want to pick the best ones. But even in the midst of that, I acknowledge that I am not perfect, and thus my theology will never be perfect, either.

In seminary, I had classmates who found themselves all along the theological spectrum, and we engaged in some pretty intense discussions surrounding theological issues like divine foreknowledge, human suffering, and free will. But never in my seminary career did I come across a student who was insincere in his or her faith and commitment to following Christ. Even though we were all there for the same purpose, we came to different theological conclusions.

I’ve come to accept that well-meaning, Christ-following, God-serving people will not always agree with me on every theological issue that arises, even the big ones. Because we’re dealing with something so far beyond our ability to understand, it is inevitable that we are going to disagree. And even though theology does matter a great deal, it is also acceptable to leave room for diversity of thought within theology.

We can debate. We can disagree. We can even come to a point where we simply have to agree to disagree. And that’s OK, because ultimately, we are all serving the same Lord who has given us each the intellectual capacity to think through these issues for ourselves in our pursuit of him.

At the end of the day, theology is all about glorifying God, and I am so grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to study theology for the past few years. I look forward to taking what I’ve learned and applying it as I move into full-time ministry and continue to pursue learning more about God through my work and personal study. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported and encouraged me through this process and to thank you for allowing me to share what I’ve learned. It’s been an incredible journey, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Dino Club: Growing Up with My Favorite Artist

I, like most people, have pretty strong emotional ties to the music I listened to during my formative years. In music, I found a way to navigate the new, complex emotions I was experiencing as I transitioned from adolescence into young adulthood. At the time, those artists provided me with a creative outlet that I desperately needed. But when I revisit those songs now, I find many of them to be immature and disconnected from my current experience. Every once in a while, I’ll try listening to new music from the musicians I loved back then, and it just isn’t the same. And so most of those artists have faded into the background and fallen off of my musical radar.

But then there’s Secret Secret Dino Club.

I’m not sure if it was serendipitous timing, the fact that I really connect with the personality and outlook of Jayce (the musician behind the project), or if the songs were just that catchy, but for whatever reason, I have been a relentlessly loyal fan of Secret Secret Dino Club since the second I first heard his music. And my love has only grown stronger over the years as I’ve followed Jayce throughout his various endeavors and even had the opportunity to interact with him a few times online. To call myself a Dino Club super-fan would be an understatement. That’s why I was so excited to listen to his new five-track EP “I Don’t Wanna Be Famous” when it came out last week, and I’m happy to report that it did not disappoint in the least.

The new EP comes after a lengthy hiatus for Secret Secret Dino Club. The project’s last studio album (“Look Cat Meow,” recently re-released as “Songs from My Myspace”) came out in 2011. Since then, Jayce has mostly focused on other projects, especially the rap/pop band Astro Safari USA that he started with his best friend JP. Though he did release an EP entitled “Like Lebron Has His Ball” under the Dino Club name last year on SoundCloud, this album serves as Jayce’s mainstream return to the project and to the musical style that defines Secret Secret Dino Club.

If I had to sum up the new album in a word, it would be “growth.” Although the style of the songs will certainly sound familiar to anyone who’s listened to Dino Club before, the lyrics most likely won’t be. They’re as fun, catchy, and witty as ever, but there’s a maturity to the content that’s new to Jayce’s work. And I find that maturity refreshing.

It’s clear from the first few moments of the album that something is different. The title track (“Famous”) begins with the lines, “I don’t want to be famous. // Famous people break up // and get hooked on drugs.” My immediate reaction to these lyrics was, “Why would Jayce care about breaking up with someone?” Dino Club doesn’t sing about maintaining romantic relationships. Dino Club sings about taking girlfriend applications and telling overbearing women to stop calling. And yet the entire song is about Jayce’s desire to avoid pursuing fame and focus instead on being real and finding love. The result is a critique of fame culture that is both entertaining and convicting at the same time. The song ends with a staple of Dino Club music: The instruments cut out just before Jayce delivers the final note, leaving only his voice. It makes for an effective conclusion to the album’s opening track.

“The Best Song I Ever Heard in My Entire Life” follows “Famous” with even more explicit references to Dino Club’s newfound focus on his relationship. The song is self-aware, critiquing itself as it progresses and recognizing itself as the best song the singer has ever heard, not necessarily because of its quality, but because of its subject. My favorite thing about this song is the layering of voices on the chorus. Jayce has a voice that is perfectly fit to be harmonize with itself, and when he uses this technique, it creates a very unique and appealing effect that I’ve always enjoyed.

The EP continues with “Art” set at the center of the track list. As a long-time follower of Secret Secret Dino Club, I am acutely aware of Jayce’s complicated relationship with the concept of art. The term is difficult to define, and it’s often used to communicate either sophistication or exemption from critique, but neither of these is satisfying. In this song, the singer finally offers his conclusive definition of art, and it’s simply the person he loves. The chorus goes so far as to say, “You’re a piece of art.” I have shared in Jayce’s frustration over the use of the term “art” over the years, and it is so cathartic to see that, at least for him, there is a meaningful answer to question of what art is.

“Easy” is by far my favorite song on the EP. This song is Dino Club at his most vulnerable. Each verse reveals the artist’s insecurities in the context of romantic relationships, and the chorus serves as both a confession that the singer is responsible for making it “not easy” to love him and an appreciation for his partner’s patience in doing so anyway. In this track, Jayce is recognizing his own shortcomings and the fact that he is loved despite them. That is a level of depth never before seen in a Dino Club song, and it really connected with me.

The album ends with “Trumpets Sing.” This is a fun little song that seems to be about Jayce’s experience meeting his girlfriend and trying to woo her. The alternative title is “Intro,” which is ironic since it is the final track on the EP and probably refers to the fact that the song deals with the beginning of a relationship that clearly means a great deal to the singer.

This new album from Secret Secret Dino Club offers the catchy, upbeat melodies and the witty lyrics that have always defined the project and drawn in fans, but it also offers something more. It incorporates a more mature, fulfilled approach to the world that reflects a significant shift in the artist’s outlook. Jayce has fallen in love, come to terms with his own imperfections, and experienced the growth that inevitably comes from truly loving someone and being loved by them, and he’s shared that growth with his listeners through this EP.

The result is an incredibly satisfying and relatable release from a musician I’ve had the honor of following as I’ve undergone my own process of developing and maturing. It feels like I got to grow up with an artist I truly admire, and I can’t think of anything better Jayce could have offered his fans with his latest release.