ENTRY #2
The Piano & The W
THE MUSIC
So much of writing a song is about allowing it to find you.
It begins with quiet — giving yourself enough silence and space that the melody has somewhere to land. In that stillness, a line appears, a phrase of music drifts through, and if I’m patient enough I can hear it clearly enough to follow it. When a full thought begins to form, I make my way to the piano. That’s where the music reveals itself. I sit with the keys and translate what I’m hearing in my head into something real, letting my hands search for the chords that feel true.
With this song, I’ve returned to the piano again and again. Each time I play through it, I try something a little different — a turn here, a new direction there — just to see where the music might want to go. Songs have a way of growing beyond the first idea, but they still have to remain honest. And what I kept coming back to was this: the beginning needed to feel small.
Because that’s exactly how this all began.
It was just Eric and me in our little place in Napa with a whiteboard and a few dreams written across it — wine, music, and a life built around the things we loved most. What began as something small and personal slowly grew as more of you became part of the story.
That’s what I want this song to capture — a beginning that feels intimate and close, and then a slow rise into something fuller and more powerful. Music, like life, needs time to unfold so it can reflect the journey.
As I write the chords and shape the words, I’m realizing the song itself is beautifully simple, but it carries a kind of momentum that grows — just as we did. I just finished writing the chorus, and it flies. It feels like that rush of inspiration when you know you’re about to leap into something exciting and can’t wait to see where it takes you. As the song continues to take shape, I hope when you hear it you’ll feel the same energy we felt in those early days — the spark of an idea, the courage to follow it, and the joy of watching it grow into something far beyond what we first imagined.
Mindi 🎶
THE WINE
The name came first.
For a long time Mindi and I searched for the right name for this — something that could carry the weight of what we hoped it would become. We tried dozens of possibilities. Some sounded good, some sounded clever, but none of them felt true. And then one day, almost casually, the word Whiteboard appeared. It was one of those quiet ah-ha moments we both immediately recognized — the kind of recognition you feel before you can explain it.
A whiteboard is where ideas begin. It’s where possibilities take shape, where something that only exists in your imagination becomes the first line of something real. Once the name revealed itself…
… then came the identity, the face, the mark.
I didn’t want a complicated, slick logo. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that complexity would betray the idea. Whiteboard needed something simple, something real — something that felt as if it could have been drawn in a single moment of inspiration, the way someone might sketch an idea quickly across a whiteboard.
So I started drawing lines. Line after line, searching for something that carried both elegance and meaning without trying too hard to be either. And then one day, this shape appeared.
Just a single sweeping motion of the hand. It begins quietly on the left, almost tentative, like the beginning of a thought. Then it dips and rises again, gathering confidence as it moves forward, before lifting into that long arc that stretches across the page like momentum… like possibility… like the idea continuing beyond. It felt right — not because it was flashy, but because it was honest.
This single line now carries the identity of Whiteboard. It reminds us that what begins as a single line can become something far greater than we first imagined.
Eric 🍷
