-From The Beginning
Music has always surrounded me as far back as I can remember but I never found myself exploring it as a hobby until around 2009. My grandfather bought me an acoustic guitar but I never felt like learning how to play it. It wasn't until I picked up Guitar Hero: Metallica when I realized I wanted to make music. I was just about to go into high school at this time when I felt the need to express myself in some way and music was that outlet. I quickly began watching the behind the scenes videos that were in the game and seeing the performances from the band and the presence they gave off that made me want to try and capture that feeling on my own. I started writing songs and trying to learn to play the guitar as I searched for people who wanted to pursue the dream of being in a rock and roll band.
​
I grew up listening to a wide variety of music genres. My parents would listen to country music and my brother was diving into his own variety of rock, punk and metal that would also influence my musical choices. I would also go on road trips with my grandparents where I would hear the occasional oldies tune. All of those things led me into pop punk and then quickly into rock and metal music. Radio also played a big role in my musical choices. I was introduced to tons of bands during that time, Avenged Sevenfold being one of the most prominent that influence my music to this day.
​
I taught myself how to play guitar which transferred itself into other instruments over time. After I learned guitar and started forming my own music I bought a ton of used drum gear from a friend in another metal band. After 2015 I started learning how music works and I began studying songs and picking apart each instrument and seeing how they worked with each other in their respective songs. Once I understood how to put music together I started producing music and teaching myself piano and how to sing. This opened up my path to building my first album.
-The Defiant Days
I made a band with two friends soon after I learned to play guitar. That band was called Defiant. Defiant was one of my longest running musical endeavors throughout my musical career. We had our share of ups and downs as most bands and friends do. We started out with no experience and we all learned to play music at the same time. We got together and messed around writing lyrics and throwing around rough ideas while teaching each other new things we learned on our own. Most of the songs never materialized and we would disagree on a ton of things which resulted in an agreement to put the music on hold. Some time went by when we finally got back together with a better understanding of our ideas and pursuits and a different attitude toward the music. I switched over from singing and playing rhythm guitar to playing drums since we never found a drummer which was one of our breaking points on our first run as a band. Songs quickly came together and we decided to play shows. We performed a small tour around Chicago which included three bar performance and two house parties before officially disbanding in 2015 to pursue our own ambitions and musical careers. The band took up roughly five years of my life and with it came tons of fun experiences and knowledge of being in a band, touring and music. After I released my first album I went back and reworked several songs from the first era of the Defiant days which you can find on my YouTube channel. I did not work on the riffs for the second era of Defiant because I played drums so I will not be releasing any reworked versions of songs from that time since they were not created by me. I have also worked with Anthony Galba (singer/guitarist) on projects after Defiant which you can also find on YouTube. He also makes his own music if you are interested in checking out his musical journey as well.
-What Lies Ahead...
My first album was almost entirely made up of songs that I had stored away while I was in Defiant and songs that I put together on my own along with music I made for projects that were later scrapped. One day in 2018 I decided to go back into my laptop and clean up my files when I stumbled upon all of my old demos. After taking a few days to go through them I decided that there was a bunch of good content stored away. I started pulling out my favorite demos so I could rerecord them and release them as a compilation album. By the Sea and A Sword for a Ring were the only two songs that were made during the rerecording process of the album. Along with rerecording the music I studied music production and how to release music globally. Over about a years time I finished and released my first album What Lies Ahead.