I picked up the bass when I was about ten thanks to a suggestion from my father (a drummer), because “guitar players are a dime a dozen,” but a skilled bassist “can always find somebody to play with.” Within the first year I was playing the first album from Counting Crows was released, which immediately made me realize that what I wanted to do most of all was write songs, so I started learning guitar along with bass. The summer before I turned sixteen my family moved to Atlanta, where a few months later I met Chris DiTuri, and in late 1999 we started a band called Fifteenth Summer. Twenty years later he and I are still playing together under that same name. That band, however, is driven by Chris’ musical vision, and save for a few songs that I wrote the whole, or majority of, Fifteenth Summer expresses his statements. I have forever had my own creative vision and things I wanted to say, much of it being very different than what I do with FS, which finally galvanized into a body of music with a unique and defined sound unto itself in 2014 under the name Picasso Blue, a sound that I’ve come to often call “heavy alterna-folk.” At that time I had been living in Seattle for a few years, but when my second marriage ended it served as a catalyst for pretty much all of the music that followed. On towards the end of 2015 I was writing and performing this new stuff in Seattle, but by the end of that year I crash-landed in SLC where my folks lived at the time. There I met an awesome young guitarist and songwriter from Alaska named Garrett Hermansen, who had also just recently landed in the area. The next two years were spent writing and playing together—first in SLC, and later in Fort Collins, CO—under the name “Everything After.” In the middle of 2017, though, I found myself moving back to Atlanta after many years spent living many, many other places, and returning to Fifteenth Summer on bass. While I love what I do with FS, ever since leaving Everything After I have been left missing playing my own stuff. So now I’ve decided to find the right folks to bring my songs to life the way I’ve always wanted them to sound. Again as Picasso Blue—for the moment, at least—I am actively looking to put together a lineup of musicians to join me on this musical road trip to a different Americana.
Music is one of the most powerful and profound forces in all of human experience, having as strong of an influence and impact upon our lives (and moreover our experience thereof) as the universe’s four fundamental forces including electromagnetism, and gravity. I’d further argue nothing else can unify and bring people together like music has done time and again. For me personally, though, I’ve spent the overwhelming majority of my life playing and writing songs anytime I had a feeling, statement, or idea to express. Having started to write music to get feelings and ideas out from that early age, I hadn’t fully developed many of the more common means, and mechanisms of processing, and expressing emotions as others, nor have I seen a reason to in the years since. It’s pretty much only through music that I can feel, that I understand the rest of the world, and that I can engage and relate to it in any sort of meaningful way. As such, making music has become as fundamental and essential to me as any biological process like my heartbeat, or respiration. .
My dream is a simple one. From a financial success standpoint the dream is simply for music alone to pay the bills, finance the records, and facilitate touring—and by “pay the bills” I mean that I’d be perfectly content staying in my mid-crappy apartment on the West End of Atlanta, so long as music would be the only job I needed to have. Aside from that my dream is to just connect with as many people through my songs as I can, whether that’s a half dozen people in a smokey barroom, or a hundred thousand in an ungodly huge arena, a billion through radio and TV, or two lonely people on a street-corner. Finally, my biggest dream of all would be to put out an album that makes some kid feel the way I felt when I first heard Counting Crows’ “August and Everything After” in the early fall of 1993.
Where would I start? I’d start with a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and get money out of politics, followed immediately by universal healthcare, sweeping and dramatic criminal justice reform, a transition to renewable energy sources at breakneck speeds, and universal basic income. All of that, save for the energy component, would really be just a first step toward the real goal of moving us beyond the concept of a monetary based society and toward something like a resource based society, where we can all have everything we need—and even the things we just like, and want—simply because there’s enough for everybody. And the fact is that statement is true and accurate right now. Scarcity is a lie that we’ve been indoctrinated to believe by the same power structures that keep us convinced of the value of currencies that aren’t backed by any physical commodity, but rather are “credit based” (and as such are purely conceptual, essentially imaginary), and serve as a means of control, keeping true power and influence firmly in the hands of those same individuals.
There are three, actually. 1) “American Pie” by Don McLean was my first favorite song, and also the first song I ever sang publicly with a mic (I was 5, and yes, it was the full version). 2) “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana obviously changed everything, and I distinctly remember the first time I saw the video (and heard the song) on MTV while eating lunch one day right after Mr Big’s “To Be With You,” and feeling that sensation that everything was changed. 3) “Round Here” by Counting Crows opened up their first record that I credit for my realization that I just wanted to write songs, and it very well may have happened within the span of that first track.
Please see my extensive list of influences.
Again, it’s my entire emotional process and means to engage with the world at large, being that I am incredibly introverted aside from when I’m on stage. Beyond that, personal experiences, outrage over the continued innumerable injustices suffered by people every day, as well as both my every hope and every fear for the future.
More than anything that love (not necessarily romantic love, but kindness, compassion, caring, and empathy) is one of the only things we know of that is not a finite resource, so give it freely anywhere you can to anyone you can, even—if not especially—to those who may not even deserve it. Just as we were told many years ago by two of our wisest sages, be excellent to each other.
When I’m NOT on stage—that being, y’know, the entirety of all the rest of the time that there is outside of that forty-five minutes or hour at a time while playing a set—a number of factors came together over time in a way that I’m now a guy for whom it’s extremely stressful, difficult, and uncomfortable to be out and around too many people for extended lengths of time. As such, I only have a very small circle of very close friends that I see with any regularity since I don’t go out much at all, and I do miss the days that I could go out and have the time of my life. Music is usually the main thing that can get me out and in big crowds without problems, because we’re all there because we love this same thing, music. When I’m on stage playing for folks is the only time that all of the anxious stuff I feel otherwise goes away completely, that I experience being fully at ease, totally let myself go, and just be together with everybody. My time playing for people who enjoy what they hear and the connection that creates is what it’s all about.
Well, clearly it’s more than just well written songs, so I’m still trying to figure that out!