Where I've Been

A re-introduction — Joe Endozo, April 2026

A year ago I released Color My Heart and wrote my first post here about the mathematics of love. Consider this the story behind both. The proof of the argument.

A year ago I wrote that life was full. It was. I just left a lot out.

Here’s the version with everything in it.

* * *

I went to Sphere twice. Once alone — got the invite by a fellow Deadhead to experience the rail, just me and the music, eye contact with Oteil Burbridge, and the whole impossible thing, done sober. Then again with my family: my parents, who were navigating a separation none of us saw coming after 34 years of marriage, and my sister and her fiancé. We sat there together inside that music and love held us. I’m still grateful for that night, the last time I would see Bobby Weir as well.

I went back to the Philippines for the first time in ten years — a dozen of my closest high school friends, their babies, once-in-a-lifetime stuff. I performed my song, Fill Me in with Everything, for the couple, a song that soundtracked the time when they started dating long distance (New York to Philippines).

I also became an officiant. Married my sister and her husband in the great outdoors of Portland, Oregon. Married my cousin and his wife in Brooklyn — Taylor Swift’s touring background singer performed in the ceremony. I stood at the front of two moments full of people I love and said the words that made it real. I was good at it. I could do it again.

And through all of it, I was watching my dog Django get older. Thirteen years old. Two growing lumps. My first dog, my Bassador, my guy. We’re both moving a little slower these days. I’ve been embracing every moment with him.

It was a full year. A heavy year. A beautiful year. I held a lot of people through it. And recently I was a musical death doula to my friend’s dying father, as well as my uncle, in the same month.

What I didn’t write about was what I was holding alone.

* * *

I launched this Substack a year ago but I hadn’t posted anything. Partly because I regained access to my Instagram after being locked out after a possible hack. Partly because I had written three albums worth of songs trying to survive a heartbreak — and I didn’t know how to begin talking about any of that. All I wanted to do was release Color My Heart, which took forever to realize.

So let me start at the beginning.

When I turned 30, I thought my days being single were over. Three years in LA, made a name for myself. Inherited my childhood home in Staten Island. I felt like I was arriving at my life. Then Covid came. I had been involuntarily celibate since my first girlfriend at 18 — twelve years — and I had done enough living and hurting and growing that I believed an angel would find me on the other side of all that.

Then I heard her voice.

“It was like the precise geometric wavelength to hold me and my history.”

It wasn’t chasing. It wasn’t proving anything. It honored jazz and folk in the same breath. She had a deep cut, a song called “There and Back.” That was the title of the first song I ever wrote, at eleven years old. We had gone to the same school, six years apart. The mythology started there and never really stopped.

In 2020 we produced something together. It led to a joint acoustic show — first one after lockdown, in the living room of a fellow alum. Intimate. Loving. It felt like a movie. But I had followed my instincts to great success before, and I trusted this.

When I told her my grandmother died, she said it would take her twenty years to understand how I was processing it at the time. I don’t believe she had ever been to a funeral at that point.

In 2020, I think I went to six.

I invested everything I had into a show that was meant to be a celebration — of music, of us, of what I hoped we were building. The night I had built everything around, I learned she was with someone else. A friend told me. I collapsed. I sobbed in front of him. I wasn’t the same after that.

That was 2022. I was in my “solar return”. But it felt like my head had been cut off.

The posters from our two shows together have never left my living room wall. They were done by my creative friends, Zac and Molly, who’ve gone on to do tremendous work.

* * *

I want her to be happy. The last time I saw her, I wished that for her out loud. I meant it then. I mean it now.

Since then I’ve lived slower. More Staten Island, more roots, more Django, more time with the people who see me fully. My parents’ separation hit like a second earthquake. I became friends again with my high school girlfriend — hadn’t spoken in ten years — she stayed with me for two weeks last Thanksgiving, we wrote Pale Blue Dot. I officiated two weddings. I studied the Dead to prepare for Bobby’s wish of “300 more years.” I went home to the Philippines. I kept making music, released one or two songs a year, each one a coordinate in a map only I can fully read.

I have an anxiety about being too much. About putting everything into the music and not knowing if any of it gets decoded on the other side.

But that era is coming to a change.

I’m 34. There are songs that need to come out still. There are stories that need to be told. There are people reading this right now — people who’ve known me since before any of this — and I don’t want to keep leaving things out.

Maybe this is what this space is going to be. Honest. Musical. A letter to the people who’ve been here the whole time.

But if there is ever silence again from me, know love will always be in the air, hiding in the melody.

— Joe

Joe Endozo is a singer-songwriter, producer, and mixer from Staten Island, NY. His music is at joeendozo.bandcamp.com