Music to me is all about life. You can find relatable messages to your own personal experience in music, listen to music that makes you feel a certain way when you want to, find music that suites and satisfies your emotional needs when the time calls for it. It is the soundtracks to our lives and we often find moments in our legacies tied to certain memorable tunes. Music brings people together and transcends other bounds and confines of human construction. To me thats a beautiful thing that not many other things can achieve. So music to me is a release, a form of expression, and a unifying cause that can be so simply satisfying if you open your ears, hearts, and minds.
My dream is to make music that brings people from all walks of life together to enjoy, and to honor the legends that have come before me in my craft. I hope to never forget the people, places, and things that were such a big part of my growing up and to stay down to earth in that regard, wherever music takes me.
Man it's hard to know where to start. When I was little I loved all the classics and was drawn to a lot of the chill easy listening music of my parents. That all started with artists like the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, The Doobie Brothers, Carlos Santana, The Police, David Bowie, The Eagles, and lots of motown and classic rhythm and blues. It was a strong early listening influence from a lot of those poppy bands from the early-mid sixties too, like The Animals, Elvis Presley, etc. In my early teens I remember getting a portable CD player and started building a collection of my own. This mostly consisted of me hunting down songs that had always stuck in my head on the radio but I had a hard time remembering who exactly sang it and what the name of the song was after asking my dad. Between my brother and myself, we were able to hunt down the sounds of albums by Steppenwolf, Black Sabbath, The Who, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick. It really wasn't until later that I started getting into a lot of the bands that I consider my biggest influences. When I picked up guitar around 15 1/2, there were certain people who I immediately had to dig into, mostly based on their cultural perception. This is when I became absorbed in the idea of learning all I could from the best - which to my ears was Eddie Van Halen, and Jimi Hendrix. I was also into learning some of the "guitar songs" that were considered pop at the time. The first song I learned on guitar was Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show. I also picked up on jams like Starships by Nicki Minaj, Weezer songs, Stacy's Mom (Fountains of Wayne), Whistle (Flo Rida), Cruise (Florida Georgia Line), Jessie's Girl, Third Eye Blind Tunes, Pumped Up Kicks/Don't Stop (Foster the People). I also fell in love with the 80's big hair scene and really dug Randy Rhoads (Ozzy Osbourne), Def Leppard, Motley Crue, The Scorpions, stuff like that. At the same time I was also getting really big on Hendrix. That really opened up my doors to bands like The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, Cream, The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Beck, and brought me back to many of the bands that I had listened to when I was little. At this time my lead playing was getting better and I had decided to start trying to conquer what are generally agreed upon as the greatest solos of all time. Again my interest was introduced to artists like Lynyrd Skynyrd (Free Bird), The Eagles again (Hotel California), Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, and what became a staple of my collection: Pink Floyd (Comfortably Numb). When I hit my Floyd Stage, I hit it hard and it remains with me as one of my favorites. I got everything of theirs and spent a lot of time really getting inside David Gilmour's guitar playing. I wanted more prog after going through their work and thats when I started exploring bands like King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake and Palmer. Spending so much time on electric I found my taste drifting away from a more processed sound and back to more organic music. Once again I found several more of my staple favorites in CSNY, Bob Dylan, revisiting Santana, John Denver, and discovering Derek Trucks's otherworldly blues playing (which in turn led me back to revisiting a lot of the Allman Brothers and Clapton). At college I was getting bored with a lot of the music I had learned, so what do you do when nobody is making the music you want to hear? The answer, for me, was starting to write. I also found appreciation for other artists I hadn't paid much attention to in the past like Rush. In addition I have happily found more music from my own generation that suites my ears' needs. This includes Greta Van Fleet, Tame Impala, The Sheepdogs, Jade Bird, The Marcus King Band, Anders Osbourne, The Dhandy Wharhols, Radio Moscow, The Struts, Jake Bugg