My Musical Background: I do not come from a family of musicians or a family where art was a large part of what was going on. However, there was always music being played in my house. My father would be listening to the radio in one room, and mother would be listening to a CD of an entirely different genre. I also spent a lot of time with my Aunt and my cousins at her house while my parents were at work. My cousins were both going into their teen years when I was growing up with them, which means that MTV was on almost everyday, and they were always listening to current music on CDs in their rooms. So from my parents to my cousins I experienced just about every style of popular music there was to be heard at a young age. Whether it was the Beatles, Conway Twitty, Shania Twain, The Offspring, or The Backstreet Boys, I was listening to it and I loved it. I loved all of it. When I was about 7 years old and my brother was 10, he decided that he wanted to play guitar and began taking guitar lessons. Naturally, when he started doing something, I also wanted to do it. It wasn’t more than a couple of months later that I also started playing guitar. I picked up the guitar fairly quickly and loved to be taught the songs that I had heard my dad playing on the radio. However, considering that fact that I was only 7 or 8 years old, didn’t have very good discipline for practice, and wasn’t interested in doing one thing consistently for more than a couple months… I put the guitar down and continued my life, as an average boy who went outside and played sports with his friends and that was it. It could’ve also been that my brother stopped playing guitar and at that age I only wanted to do the things that he was doing. So if he wasn’t playing guitar, neither was I. It wasn’t until I was in junior high that I found interest in the guitar again. As my body began to change with my hormones, so did my interests, that primarily being that I was interested in girls. In fact, they were my biggest interest: everything else seemed to revolve around the idea of girls. With the realization that I wanted girls to like me came the realization that girls liked guys who could play music. Sure enough I picked up the guitar again and started learning basically every love song that I could think of. The main reason that I played guitar was not for myself, but for girls. The more I played, the more I enjoyed it, and, after a year of playing, I had begun to take an interest in music as more than just a means to attract girls. By the time I got to high school, I considered myself a guitarist, and music became my main focus. I took guitar classes all four years of high school and played in a band. I knew that I wanted to learn more about music and make music for a living. So I applied to Berklee to further my education and give myself a chance to step into the music industry. I am currently a singer/songwriter studying Songwriting at Berklee.
My Music: I write music in many different genres for many different reasons. Whether it’s for a commercial, a television show, or an artist, I’m always writing. However, my favorite reason to write is for my own band. My band, Moonshine, is an Alternative/Rock band with a southern feel to it. We are currently a four-piece band consisting of a drummer, bass player, guitar, and guitar/vocals. I am the singer of the band, I write most of the music, but we arrange the music as a band. The music that we play is fairly simple but not so simple that it isn’t interesting. In my writing, I really like the lyrics to stand out and I use the harmony and melody to represent the lyrics instead of the other way around. I base a lot of what I write on the folk songwriters whom I listen to and look up to. I want the music that I write to impact the largest possible audience that it can. I write music that younger people can listen to and love for the melody and rhythm of the songs, and music that older people can relate to and reflect on. To sum up it up, the music I write is a collection of events and views on the world that I have experienced throughout the course of my life. And I know that as my life progresses, so will my music.
| Berklee | This user attends or attended Berklee College of Music. |