MNYS stands for My New York Summer.

It started as a name for a version of life that felt far away. Cleaner. Bigger. Easier. Somewhere else. Something else.

That was the fantasy. The truth is different.

MNYS is about making it out of a hard place and realizing the world does not stop being hard just because your life looks better from the outside.

I grew up around love and chaos at the same time. Loving parents. Real family. Real survival. Evictions. Addiction. Violence. Money problems. Instability. The kind of life where you learn how to read a room before you learn how to relax in one.

The kind of life most people try to understand from the outside. They hear “poverty” and think money. They think bills. Budgets. Bad decisions. Someone needing to learn how to add numbers better.

But poverty is not just having less.

Sometimes poverty is being 9 years old while your mom is at her second job, being told not to answer the door for anyone, and knowing there is dinner in the fridge.

Then someone you love knocks. He is bleeding.

And you are a child trying to decide which rule breaks your life less. That is the part people do not understand until they really sit with it.

It is not a spreadsheet. It is not a class. It is not a lack of discipline.

It is growing up inside situations that ask more from you than childhood was supposed to ask.

Then I got older.

I went to college. Got the jobs. Got in the rooms. Wrote the songs. Proved myself over and over again.

And then you learn there is another game on the other side.

Because getting in the room does not mean the room sees you clearly.

You meet people who are not evil. Some are kind. Some are talented. Some mean well. Some simply had a different starting line. They got room to become themselves.

That is not the same as becoming yourself under pressure.

And maybe that is the part I am still learning how to say without sounding angry.

Because sometimes, when you finally get into the room, the things you spent your whole life learning how to build become easy for other people to take.

A song. An idea. A model.
A way of seeing the world.

The thing you clawed toward because you had no safety net becomes something someone else can pick up, polish, and call their own.

And it is hard not to feel insane inside that. Because to them, it may just look like an idea. To you, it was years of survival turning into instinct.

And you realize the unfairness did not end. It just got better lighting.

But that is also where the truth sharpens.

They can copy the idea. They can copy the language. They can copy the shape of the thing.

They cannot copy the reps.

They cannot copy the years of having to figure it out with no map. They cannot copy the pressure that taught you how to create from nothing. They cannot copy the part of you that learned to will something into reality because there was no other option.

So you get better.

Better at the craft.
Better at the work.
Better at building.
Better at turning pain into something that can stand on its own.

And still, something feels off.

Because making it out does not mean you feel free.
It does not mean you feel understood.
It does not mean you know where you belong.

That is MNYS.

Not a perfect success story.
Not a victim story.
Not a comeback story with a clean ending.

MNYS is the uncomfortable middle: being grateful and angry at the same time. You can make it out of the system and still be mad as f*ck about it existing. Proud of where I came from, but unable to fully live there anymore. Accepted into new rooms, but never fully from them.

But I know now that helping is not as simple as handing someone the thing you needed.

Because when you are still inside it, money can look like the whole answer. And I understand why. When you do not have enough of it, money feels like oxygen. It feels like the thing that would finally make everything stop hurting.

And sometimes it does help.

It can pay the bill. It can keep the lights on. It can buy time. It can create space.

And money does not automatically teach safety. It does not undo fear. It does not fix the way people see you, or the way you learned to see yourself. It does not erase the rules you had to learn to survive.

That is the part people miss from both sides.

The people outside it think money is the lesson.
The people inside it think money is the exit.


I want to help the people still inside it. Not because I have some perfect answer. Not because I think I escaped clean. Not because I want to become another person standing above them with a worksheet.

I want to help because I know what it feels like when the world mistakes survival for weakness.

ECLIPSED is the album built from that feeling.

It is about being unseen. Overlooked. Misread. It is about doing the work, surviving the odds, and still feeling like something or someone else is standing in front of the light.

The world of Mono exists because some things are easier to tell through a character than a biography.

Mono is the underdog version of MNYS: built from broken parts, trying to become real, trying to break through, trying to understand why survival did not feel like victory.

MNYS is for people who know that changing your life does not automatically heal your life.

It just gives you a new place to stand while you figure out what still hurts.