About

I build structures that let creative work happen.

I'm Kevin Vertrees — a singer, pianist and composer in Brooklyn, a certified meditation instructor, and someone who has spent a career leading technology teams and long transformation projects. Those used to feel like three separate lives. This site is where I stopped treating them that way.

I came to technology through music. My teenage earnings didn't go toward a car — they went to a Yamaha DX7 and the first Apple Macintosh. That order still explains most of how I think. I've been building systems ever since, and the ones worth building are the ones that leave room for the work to happen.

What you'll find here:

Essays on building the K Note Operating System — a personal operating system for creative work, designed in conversation with AI rather than specified in advance. It started on a two-day drive from New Orleans back to Brooklyn, talking to my phone at seventy miles an hour.

Songs, and the thinking underneath them — composition, chord charts, and what happens when a song is treated as a project rather than a moment of inspiration.

Meditations from a daily, no-matter-what practice, and from working with men exploring their inner landscape.

The through-line is one question asked in different rooms: what structure does creative work actually need, and what does it need you to leave alone?

My music, and the DUMBO Gumbo, live at kevinvertrees.com.