Personal Statement

My interest in songwriting has been a long standing love of mine. Since I first picked up a guitar at 14, I’ve been captivated at the possibility of writing and playing my own material. In some form or another, I’ve been doing just that since my early days of high school, both by myself and in front of other people. To me, there are few things more fulfilling than singing a song I wrote myself, for a crowd of people.

In my junior year of high school, I began becoming comfortable enough to share the songs I was writing with other people with the goal of forming a band to play true Rock & Roll music, not the standard monotony that’s been heard on the radio and MTV since the early 1980’s. My goal was to get a group centered around my songwriting in which I could take the spotlight off myself, have someone else sing the songs, playing the stand-out instrumentation, with me hiding behind a bass guitar off in the corner. Throughout the rest of high school, I was basically successful at doing just this, but it was deeply unsatisfying.

Since the start of college, I have been creatively preoccupied with enhancing my own horizons in literature, media, and music. The result has been a great enhancement in my ability to compose songs of meaning. In art, it is said, “To evoke emotion is to produce great art.” While I can’t vouch for my own work generating great emotion, I can state that is my goal and I see evidence in myself to see that I am making progress. I’ve begun singing and playing my own material, both solo and accompanied by others. I personally feel that this an important and pivotal step in my own songwriting evolution. Experiencing response to my own material as fist hand as possible allows me to see what works and where changes and improvements are needed. I have been a very studious learner in these recent performing experiences and have seen the potential for true growth in all I am trying to do.

My universal goal is to find ways to put soul back into the music the everyday person listens too. I want put the “roll” back in Rock. I want to wipe the music culture of today’s celebrity first status. I compose many different kinds of songs, many of which that come off sounding many different ways that can seem different from edgy to soulful, heartfelt to nasty. I want music to get back to a place where it is at forefront of cultural experimentation and I want to take it there if I have to pull on my own back. I know I am not where I need to be. But with some hard work and the right kind of path, I’m going to be a part of changing the face of modern music.