About the Artist

When I was a child, I did not play any instruments. I was not in band. I didn’t hang out with anyone who was in any way musical.

Well, I take that back. Sort of. When I was in elementary school, a friend and I would record us shouting into his tape recording, doing something I guess we thought was singing. It wasn’t, really, but it was fun.

I had always liked rock. Ever since I was very young. My mother stopped playing some of her records because they made me run and jump around too much. But I really never had any exposure to “heavy” rock – more like Elton John, Billy Joel, and oldies.

When I was 13, I found myself in front of a piano at summer camp. I didn’t know how to play. When I sat down, my first inclination was to make something up. Write my own little song. See, I never really wanted to take piano lessons, but I immediately loved the act of playing it. I loved that I could make whatever sounds I wanted – or, whatever sounds I knew how to play. Regardless, it was fun. From that point onward, whenever I found a piano, I would tap out a little song. It was never anything advanced, but it made me smile. People would tell me, “stop playing that, it’s too sad.” And it was. I liked to play melancholy music.

When I was in high school, one of my cousins bought a Casio keyboard. I visited his house, and I was amazed by it. This thing was a blast. I knew I wanted my own. But it was $300. My parents didn’t think I would use it. I didn’t have a job. Still, I saved for months (my allowance, of course) and eventually bought it. It only had enough memory to store two arrangements, so I had to be creative. But immediately, I was writing songs. I felt like a musician.

But you know, I had always wanted to play guitar. I had a broken acoustic with three strings in my closet. I couldn’t play it, and I didn’t know how to learn. I focused on the keyboard instead. When I got ready to go to college, I finally had my own computer. Of course, I wanted to record on it, but I didn’t have any software, or even the right equipment. I kept on messing with the Casio, though. At least it was something.

When I went to college, I immediately got a guitar. Actually, it was a classic Gibson SG (1971) that had belonged to an uncle of mine, and my grandfather gave it to me. I bought a little amp from a friend, and I tried my hardest to learn. You know what? It’s not easy. In the beginning, my hands didn’t make the right shapes. I couldn’t hold the pick. I couldn’t strum, and I didn’t know how to get the sounds I heard on my favorite albums. When I tried to play the chords I saw in books or online, my hands hurt. I was clumsy. Basically, I sucked. But even then, I was writing my own riffs. They were simple, but they were my own.

Really, I learned to play through tablature. I would listen to a song I liked (Metallica, Def Leppard, The Offspring – those were some of the bands I was really into back then), try to play the right chords, and usually fail. But I started to pick up little tricks. That cool sound in that song? The chord looks like this. I started to learn how to apply what I heard to what I played. But it was slow work. I couldn’t record anything. I didn’t even know how. Oh, and I lost the Gibson – had to give it back to my uncle. I guess he still wanted it. Oops. I replaced it with a guitar a friend of a friend found at the dump. It was made of plywood.

While I was learning to play guitar, I was also making electronic music. Piano, bass, and strings. Moody, soundtrack-type stuff. I was really into RPGs and console games at the time, and they have great soundtracks. I wanted to make music like that. I learned a lot about song structure making those tracks. I also learned a lot about mixing and production. But my gear sucked, and I could never tell how my songs would sound on a real stereo. It was discouraging.

In college, though, my music-making was really taking off. And I got a new guitar: an Epiphone Les Paul. I didn’t know much about guitars, but I eventually settled on it after a lot of research. I wanted something that looked cool, but that I wouldn’t mind playing when I was 30. That ruled out the BC Richs and other gothic guitars – which I really wanted at the time, to be honest. I wanted an NJ Virgin. I’m glad I didn’t get one, because I don’t play black metal. I went through two broken guitars before I finally got the Les Paul I ended up keeping. The first two had Floyd Rose systems installed. I couldn’t even get them to work. Seriously. Never give a double-locking tremolo to a kid who can’t even play guitar.

I did learn more about guitar, though. I have a bit of an obsessive streak when it comes to music. I listen to it on endless repeat sometimes. I like to play the same bit of a song again and again until I've internalized it. I was listening to rock, pop, techno, metal - whatever I felt like in any given moment. I learned all the sounds, and how they were made. I learned what production tricks were used where. I couldn't apply any of it, but I knew how to spot them when I heard them. I was still making piano tracks, and they were pretty good. I liked to use them for background music in film projects for my classes.

But eventually, I hit a wall. I was completely sick of making piano music, but I couldn’t record guitar. It just didn’t sound any good. I had a modeling effects pedal, but I didn’t use it to record. I just played it through my crappy little amp and pretended it was a huge stack.

After some seriously-flawed attempts at laying down tracks (recording the guitar first, then trying to match the bass and drums to it?), I got into a groove and recorded my first album. Looking back, I would call those songs demos, but at the time they sounded like a rock masterpiece to me. Heavy, fuzzy guitars, all tuned to drop C, with basic drum beats and bass lines that were WAY too loud (I wouldn’t overcome that issue until I bought some decent mixing headphones a few years later). But I was happy. I was recording guitar. Sure, I used the same set of strings for an entire album. Sure, half the songs weren’t any good. But try to imagine my enthusiasm. I still couldn’t believe I was actually playing the guitar.

At that point, I entered a predictable pattern: a series of demo albums, each one a little more advanced than the one before it. And I gave them all names: “Behind Closed Doors”; “Waiting for Daylight”; “Shiver”; “Father of Faces”; “Heather’s Last Breath”; “Season Red Eye”; “Bastard Buffet”. I recorded a lot of music. You’ve got to remember that I was making piano tracks long before I did anything with guitar, and I had six “albums” of those. All in all, I had close to a hundred finished songs.

Around the time I recorded “Season Red Eye”, though, I was really getting burned out. Why was I even making these songs? No one ever heard them. I mean that, too – I had only ever shown, at most, my family and a few friends, and most of the songs didn’t even get that much exposure.

But “Bastard Buffet” was my best demo set ever. It’s no coincidence that four songs from that album were used on “The Solomon Project” with only minimal changes to the music. But that brings me to the real issue: everyone expects a song to have lyrics. I wasn’t a singer. I had absolutely no vocal range, and I was too embarrassed to sing in front of anyone. How could I ever practice?

I tried being in a band briefly, as one of two guitarists, but it collapsed when the three of us wound up too busy to play. I settled back into making instrumental tracks. I had dozens of working files. See, that’s something I do: I have probably a hundred unfinished tracks, and twice that many riffs lying around on my computer. I have a hard time finishing things. The spark of inspiration fades so quickly.

And really, that’s where the story of “The Solomon Project” begins. If you’re reading these pages in order, you’ve probably already been there.