In 2014, Garris put his red guitar in its case, sold nearly everything he owned, and moved from Nashville to China.In 2026, he's unpacking a vault of over 2,000 songs from his home office in Kunming.A disciple of Americana’s greatest folk singers and keeper of a large personal hymnal he calls "the literal soundtrack to my life," Garris has spent decades writing, recording, shaping, and storing a vast personal archive of songs while living a life that, from the outside, did not resemble a conventional artist ascent. While other musicians were building public momentum, Garris was living across countries, raising a family, teaching children, ghost producing kids music in three languages, and quietly continuing to write with unusual consistency and depth. The songs kept coming. The public version of the artist did not.Now, that is changing.Garris & The Color Wheel exists at the meeting point of confession and consolation. The music makes hearts ache and rooms grow still. Built from fluttering fingerpicked guitar, tenderly self-aware lyrics, and tangles of Rhodes, upright piano, Fender Jazz Bass, and brushed vintage drums, his songs carry melancholy, clarity, and catharsis in the same open hand. They feel handmade, weathered, and deeply inhabited: part coffee-break daydream, part spiritual reckoning, part slow return to the self.What makes Garris distinct is not only the size of the archive behind him, but the emotional and symbolic world gathering around it. His work draws from a life lived between identities and geographies: America and China, artistry and anonymity, devotion and disillusionment, adulthood and the inner child, realism and myth.On breaks at the Chinese kindergarten where he works, he daydreams about the Himalayas, LEGO myth-making, and 2000s indie-folk records reimagined as electropop. That strange triangulation says a lot about the project itself: rooted in tradition, restless in form, intimate in feeling, and always quietly tilting toward transformation.In June 2025, an unexpected online encounter with a singer-songwriter turned psychic channeler left Garris with a suspicion he could no longer shake: his songs weren't finished with him. What followed was less a comeback than a reluctant return, shaped by devotion, curiosity, and the realization that the songs he had kept hidden for years were meant to be shared. The result is not a debut in the traditional sense, but a re-emergence: an artist returning not as a beginner, but as someone finally ready to reveal what has been forming underground for a long time.After spending a summer organizing a vault of over 2,000 songs onto a single thumb drive and a winter immersed in the inner workings of the modern music business, Garris is stepping back into public view with a sequence of six singles rolling out into 2027. The first is a song from 2009 he had dismissed as compost for sixteen years, until a snippet posted to TikTok on Christmas Eve drew 14,000 views and 1,094 comments, forcing him to hear it again with new ears.As those same ears imagine Damien Rice songs produced with layered synths and drum machines, Garris's daydreaming is interrupted by the bell, and he heads back to his newly opened children's music studio, where he teaches four year olds with names like Bean and Spiderman how to swing dance and play desk bells.

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