Jonathan and Carol have been two of my closest friends for almost twenty years now, but it didn’t start out warm and fuzzy. I first met Jonathan around Halloween of 2006 at my cubicle in the Rho offices. I was wearing my brown leather jacket, and I also had on a princess hat, which Jonathan took as a clear signal that I was gay. That day he was being walked around and introduced because it was his first day, and I think Cynthia—who he reported to—was the one doing the introductions.
At the time, I was actively campaigning for my friend Nathan Brown to get that job and was not happy that Jonathan got it instead. I remember being angry and judgmental about it. Cynthia had a reputation for hiring attractive men, and Jonathan fit the bill, so I held this immediate notion in my head that he was just some “pretty boy” who got picked over the more qualified person.
Some evenings I was also bartending at the Cat’s Cradle while working at Rho, and one night I saw Jonathan and Carol at a show there. I don’t remember the band that was playing, but I do remember that they came up to the bar, I served them, and we had an unexpectedly pleasant conversation. Just seeing that they were out at a live music venue—and being genuinely nice—was enough to crack my initial bias. It made me think, okay, these are probably cool people. I invited them to come see me perform with the office band, the Rho Band, at Local 506.
That show at Local 506 was a massive deal for me because it was the first time I’d ever performed live. I became the lead singer mostly because I had the least inhibitions (and every other member was strongly opposed to singing). I’m not an especially good singer, and I’m not a very talented guitarist either, but I had the drive to make songs and make the band happen, so I ended up out front. I remember some nerves, but the bigger thing was realizing the excitement of performing and feeling that buzz for the first time—made even better by the fact that Jonathan and Carol were there being supportive.
The next day I got this burned DVD from Jonathan that appeared in my cubicle like a gift. It had photos and video from the night before. I don’t remember what specific moments were on it, but the gesture itself left a mark. It made me want to do more with them, and it told me something important about Jonathan: he noticed people, and he showed up.
Around that same work era, there was another very Jonathan thing he did that still cracks me up. I went to this “Success” convention where Colin Powell spoke, and Jonathan had played hooky from work that day—so afterward, he anxiously grilled me with question after question about every speaker, every detail, who was there, what happened, all of it. The whole point was so he could convincingly pretend he’d been there if anyone asked. It was equal parts ridiculous and brilliant.
Quick aside: a memorable speaker from that day was introduced by the woman who was MC as "the most talented, intelligent man I have ever met and I am proud to call him my husband." The ginger-haired whisp of a man pranced on stage and metaphorically burst into flames with perhaps the most gay, "helooooooooo!" I have heard in my life.
Chris Rossi—our bassist in The Rho Band (later renamed "Sexy Prime")—spent time in Sicily and had this adventurous habit of inviting friends to join him. I even visited him for a couple weeks. But while Chris was away for months, we still practiced, and because of that Cat’s Cradle connection and the DVD, I asked Jonathan if he played bass. He joined the Rho Band as interim bass player while Chris was in Italy and picked it up incredibly fast—he’s just a very talented musician. Honestly, he was so good that when Chris returned it got awkward. Politics prevailed: Chris resumed bass, and Jonathan shifted to keyboard and miscellaneous sound effects, and it became a five-person band.
Chris can be awkward and is famously not delicate in how he frames things, and I was still new to songwriting—thrilled anytime I made something that resembled a song. One rehearsal, I brought in a song and didn’t know how to end it. While we were practicing it, I figured out an ending I liked. Then Chris suggested his own ending, and I told him I liked mine better. He reacted really negatively and quit on the spot.
The moment Jonathan and Carol truly became “our people” happened on February 29th, 2008—Leap Day—when I invited them to hang out with me and Meredith at the Green Room in Durham. Or maybe they invited us out? It’s a dive bar that’s famous for a brief scene in Bull Durham. We drank beers and played shuffleboard. There wasn’t one defining conversation; it was simpler than that. From that night forward, it was just understood: we were friends. That kicked off what I think of now as a golden age—more free time, more hanging out, and this constant sense of creative electricity.
Jonathan was also always down for adventures. On March 29th, 2008, he helped me move an old hot tub my dad had bought on Craigslist—one of those classic dad purchases that he never ended up using. My dad lived in this hodgepodge house in Pittsboro with his wife, Gail, and he had this junky personality in the most specific way: loved going to the dump, loved the salvage shed, always dragging home some “deal.” Jonathan and I hauled that hot tub off a trailer toward the lower landing where it was supposed to go, and at one point it sort of got away from us and almost crushed one of us.
Not long after, on April 28th, 2008, Jonathan, Carol, Meredith, and I went to the Obama rally at the Dean Dome at UNC. I think it was Halloween of that year that I photographed them as Night of the Living Dead zombies in the Northgate Mall (which was almost completely empty of other people). It all felt like part of the same era: friends hanging out, feeling like we were in the world.
Then in January 2009, Jonathan and I drove to the Laurinburg area to sing to Amanda Guffey as she was dying of pancreatic cancer. We sang “Friday I’m in Love” by The Cure, “Hey, Good Lookin’” by Hank Williams, and an instrumental we were working on for our band Coverhogs. Amanda was heavily sedated, drifting in and out of consciousness. She did her best to show appreciation, but she was fading—her ghost was escaping as we were there. I gave her a white geodesic dome I’d made with the laser cutter I owned with my sister Julie, but poor Amanda couldn't really make sense of it. That trip sits in my memory as one of the purest examples that Jonathan is ride-or-die for his friends.
Jonathan and Carol’s Parker Street house in Durham became a hub for epic parties and a lot of my best memories. Years later, in 2025, one of them sent me the listing when the house went back on the market, and for a second I had that impossible thought—what if we could all just buy it? Practically it made no sense, but emotionally it was tempting because of everything that happened there. One raucous party stands out where there was karaoke, Josh drunkenly sang “If You Seek Amy” by Britney Spears. Jonathan’s brother and sister-in-law were there, and the night devolved into this drunken collage of scenes, including Josh passed out in the laundry room.
Musically, the Rho Band wasn’t enough for me. It was essentially a rock band—covers, and a few originals that still lived in a rock format. But I wanted to write softer, more thoughtful, more powerful songs. One of the first that felt truly like a “real song” was called “High Resolution.” I made a demo and eventually got Andrea Connelly to add vocals, and it became this beautiful recording. I emailed it to Jonathan and Carol, and Carol responded she was “balling” while listening.
That was part of what pushed me to form something new with Jonathan and Carol: a band we called Coverhogs. I loved the name because it meant someone who steals the covers in the middle of the night, but my friend Billy got totally confused and thought it referred to cover songs and Harley Davidsons. Our tongue-in-cheek dream was that we’d reach the pinnacle of success by playing Bear Rock Cafe while people ate pastrami sandwiches and cheddar broccoli bread bowls.
Coverhogs eventually formed the core of what became Graveyard Fields, with Andrea Connelly, her husband Pete Connelly, and later Josh Starmer on cello. Throughout all of it, Carol was also documenting that era—she’s a talented photographer—and she captured some great moments from when we’d visit the graveyard in West Durham near their house.
And on top of everything else, Jonathan and Carol were instrumental in my relationship with Meredith. On August 24th, 2008, they helped me propose. The plan was to take Meredith on a nighttime walk in the Chapel Hill woods up to a rock outcropping covered in candles. Jonathan and Carol handled the covert operation: I gave them the candles, we coordinated timing through stealthy text messages, and they placed everything so flawlessly that Meredith and I couldn’t even tell they’d been there. They even brought a fire extinguisher because they were worried the candles would set the woods on fire.
When Meredith and I came upon the outcropping, it could’ve looked like a druid ritual—this glowing, candlelit rock altar in the woods—but thankfully it read as romance, not menace. Meredith wasn’t scared, I proposed, she said yes, and then we all went back to my house where her friend Kate Barr was waiting, and we celebrated with champagne.
When I zoom out now, Jonathan and Carol are the kinds of friends you can count on—people who show up for the ridiculous, the creative, and the sacred. They have been the cornerstones to precious moments in my life, including at our wedding as chuppa holders, and I still think back to that Leap Day in 2008 at the Green Room as the moment when it all quietly clicked into place.