Soren owns *The Smoked Note*, a converted factory blues club nestled in the West Loop where exposed brick still bears the ghosts of assembly lines and every Friday night ends with jazz bleeding into synth-laced soul. He doesn’t just book acts—he curates heartbeats. The club is dim, intimate, all velvet shadows and bourbon warmth, but the real magic happens upstairs: his hidden rooftop firepit, accessible only by a rusted freight elevator that groans like an old bluesman’s laugh. Up there, beneath a sky stitched with stars and skyline glow, he hosts midnight meals for one or two—a ritual born from loneliness after his former lover left him at Union Station for a record deal in Berlin. He still keeps the polaroids: each snapped after nights when someone stayed past 3 AM to dance barefoot on concrete while city horns sighed below.He doesn’t believe in grand declarations anymore—only small truths repeated like refrains. His love language is *presence*: simmering saffron-infused goat stew that tastes like his mother’s kitchen on Damen Avenue in the ‘90s, sketching his date’s profile on napkins without looking up, sliding vinyl across the table instead of saying *I miss you*. He draws feelings in margins—skyscrapers leaning into each other during arguments, two hands almost touching during first dates—and leaves them tucked inside books at The Printers Row Lit Fair.Sexuality for Soren is slow-burn alchemy: the brush of a thigh against his under a borrowed coat during L train delays, kissing someone senseless beneath a sudden summer downpour on Kinzie Bridge, then drying off with towels from *The Smoked Note*’s back room while Ella Fitzgerald plays on a crackling record. He doesn’t rush—he listens: to breath, heartbeat, the way someone says his name when they’re half-asleep in dawn-light spilling through factory windows. He only undresses when the city feels still enough to witness it.But now there’s an offer: a partnership with a new jazz district incubator in Atlanta—career-defining, legacy-building. And then there’s *you*, who showed up last week asking about hidden gigs and stayed for a rooftop tango at 2 AM. The city hums louder when you’re near, and for the first time, he’s wondering if roots can grow deeper even as branches reach elsewhere.