A handmade LEGO lyric video from the growing visual archive of Garris & The Color Wheel.

Garris & The Color Wheel is the long-hidden songworld of Garris—a South Carolina-born songwriter, producer, writer, and educator whose work begins in Americana and indie folk but refuses to remain inside a single genre or medium.In 2014, Garris put his red guitar in its case, sold nearly everything he owned, and left Nashville. What followed was not a conventional artist ascent, but a decade-long journey into the fringes of alternative living. Garris wandered through countries, languages, and identities: China, India, Mexico, marriage, fatherhood, teaching, spiritual searching, and an ever growing archive of heartfelt songs existing alongside hundreds of children’s-music projects produced in English, Spanish, and Chinese.Though Garris stopped sharing it, the private work never stopped. Songs accumulated in notebooks, voice memos, hard drives, and unfinished recording sessions until the archive exceeded 2,000 songs and fragments. The songs kept coming. The public version of the artist did not.In June 2025, a conversation with another songwriter reopened a door Garris had spent years circling. That summer, he began gathering the archive into one place, cataloguing more than 2,000 pieces, reopening dormant recordings, and examining old artistic identities rather than discarding them.On April 13, 2026, he released “Better Leave Me Soon,” a song written in 2009 after his first adult breakup. The release was the first visible proof that the archive could move again—that work preserved for years could re-enter the present without pretending the intervening life had never happened.Beginning in May, Garris turned toward the deeper architecture beneath the music. Throughout the summer, he gathered hundreds of pages of songs, journals, lyrics, photographs, recovered writings, and unfinished fragments into a private chronological sourcebook called The Color Wheel. Its purpose was integration: arranging the evidence of a complicated life until the person who made it could finally see how the pieces belonged together.That internal organization is now changing how Garris appears externally. Music is being released again. Poetry has returned through short-form videos. After decades away from visual art, he has begun drawing and illustrating again. Podcast conversations are taking shape, while a hand-drawn interactive world is being built at his website to house the archive and the stories behind it.These are not separate side projects. They are different rooms inside the same house.The next doorway is “Beautiful Words,” an alt-country and folk-rock single releasing September 29, 2026. Warm, guitar-led, and colored by slide, pedal steel, and female harmonies, the song remembers falling in love through another person’s language, ideas, and intimate traces.Garris & The Color Wheel is not a return to the person who put his guitar away in 2014. It is the emergence of someone more integrated: artist, father, educator, writer, musician, and maker no longer competing for space inside the same life. The work is no longer sitting idle in storage. It is becoming a public practice.

• PRESS PHOTOS + artwork
• “Beautiful Words” one-sheet

• FULL EPK download