Good Dog Nigel is the stage name of Parker Emeigh. At 10, Parker would dress up when his mom took him on errands around Lynchburg, Virginia. In highschool, he would dress as wildly as possible, selecting clothes from his trunk of costumes “just to entertain myself and the kids around me.”

At 20, with a strong feeling of not fitting in, he dropped out of college supported by a mixture of his parents’ radical optimism and the thought that you can truly do whatever you want, which it turned out for Parker, was to entertain. If school and the people who attended it didn’t make sense to Parker, when he picked up a guitar and started writing songs as Good Dog Nigel, he had found his vehicle. Parker writes with a purpose of overarching optimism, a desire to reach for the small gems in life and how to help others find and relish them too.

One thing we can all learn from Parker Emeigh of Good Dog Nigel, a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic, is that “life is too precious to not do what makes you and others happy.” His music is there for all of us striving for that ideal.