How Love Begins

That same instinct led Zoraitis to start the Modern Songbook Society, a project devoted to the idea that the great American songbook doesn't necessarily have to be a closed book.

Her album How Love Begins won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2024, but she remains fiercely independent and largely self-managed.

We talked recently about all of this, about her early years as a rising soccer player, about an injury that took her away from the soccer pitch and towards her own vocal pitch, her brief stint as a trombone player, her years of hustling in New York, what it means to live a jazz life in today's music business, She plays something like 150 shows a year, mostly on the road, and how she went about creating the world of The Devil I Knew.

Nicole Zoraitis is a lot of fun to talk to, a lot of fun to listen to, a lot of fun to be around.

Wow, that gives me chills, especially coming from you, because you... are such an incredible songwriter and you've written so many and released so many of your own songs.

And so you know what it means to release songs that you write.

The process for The Deadline News started, you know, I released How Love Begins in 2023, but I wrote that record in 2021 So since 2022, I've been writing music and storing it away and trying to figure out what to do with those songs, which is why I put out Siren Songs, which is covers of women that I love, and Live at Vic's, which is the record that I made because every time I would do a show, people would come up afterwards and say, do you have Wichita Live Man on a CD? And I was like, you know what? I want to make 20 bucks every time somebody says that to me.

So I'm going to make a live record.

He remains deeply active as a producer and engineer while also consulting on studio design and in 2018 received a tech award for excellence in studio design.

David has served as president and board member of Spars, earned a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal for his work on Nicole Zeratus' How Love Begins, and continues to bridge the creative and operational sides of the recording industry.

Most recently, David produced Freedom with Dave and the Divas.

A deeply personal project pairing reimagined Elton John songs with original compositions by his late sister, Jenny Amlin, highlighting his ongoing focus on authentic human-centered music.