I have been playing instruments since I was 6 and writing music since I was 15 years old. At that energetic age I negotiated with my mother to quit playing piano – more specifically, classical music which I despised at the time – in exchange for keeping up with music in a different form. Alas, guitar was for me, I for it, and we have yet to part ways. My brother Wade finagled a similar truce and transitioned to drums. In retrospect, as is so often the case, without mom’s insistence on “music lessons” one of the biggest gifts of my life would have never happened. Thanks mom.
Wade and I would compose music together for 20 years in the vein of riff-rock (as we called it) under various monikers, the most prominent of which was Starewell. With college buddy’s Chris Rozell and Mark Bromley, we survived on original music for the better part of decade until real-life came calling. We became family men and dads, and frankly the break from writing music was a blessing for me. By the time the band had finished its last studio album in 2013 I was completely spent of all motivation and creativity.
Seven years away from music and writing was exactly what the doctor ordered, and the pandemonium of the 2020’s an ideal kick starter to free rusty gears. Four years later I am pleased to release my first solo – which honestly feels weird to say – album “Sorrow’s Soldiers”. Truthfully it was the creative venture I needed, in order to refresh, reload and try things I have never dared in the past. This album contains my first instrumental (“Sorrow’s Soldiers”), first piano-based song (“Always be my girl”), first banjo-based song (“Enough”), first lap steel-based song (“Winter is coming) and first song recorded on the diatonic Merlin (“Back to the farm”). This was also the first album I recorded without a real drummer, first album where my sister Chelsea and I collaborated (“Defeated”) as well as, the first album mastered, and artwork generated by AI algorithms. Yes, those algos can write music too, but I did that part myself this time!
Songwriting and music production has changed a lot since I was 15. Back then Wade and I had a single Radio Shack microphone plugged into a dual cassette deck “ghetto blaster” we used to capture the drum tone, and myself strumming and singing off-key in a separate bedroom for sound isolation purposes. Makes me chuckle just thinking about it. Years later the technicalities look much different, but my love for the incremental, evolving, constructive process of music creation remains the same; it is in me no matter what I do.
Thanks for visiting the site and enjoy the music!
Brett