S3 MUSIC + SOUND

1982 

I started playing bass when I was 12 and didn't become a songwriter until I was 25. For most of my life in Boston, I played in bands as a regular and concurrently performed as a session player both live and in the studio. At 25, while shopping in a really bad mall, a friend of mine told me that I played bass very melodically and that I should write tunes.

I tried writing on bass and completely failed. My style of playing bass was always very busy and syncopated and I was never very coordinated to begin with, so trying to sing melody lines over all these disco, jazz and funk grooves that I was writing was impossible and sounded really awful, so I stopped immediately. My friend lent me his mom's miniature Casio keyboard and I taught myself how to play quite simply and very quickly. The real magic arrived when I turned on the drum machine. I played over two different beats, one in 4/4 and one in 6/8 and 24 hours later, I had written two songs, "Casino," and "In Praise of Blankets."

I nervously played them with my hands shaking and my voice wafting aimlessly out of tune for my friend Mike Suby, who was also my band mate. He was completely devoid of expression as I played them and then he said, "These songs are great... You write hits...Lets play them." So, we played them; he sang lead vocals, we hired 10 different keyboard players to play the parts and I played bass and sang backing vocals on my own songs. We called ourselves Fizz, then the Brothers Fizz, then Fizz, again and finally we called ourselves the Faders, as we knew we were done. Mike and I did not like playing live. We liked writing and recording music together and hated playing gigs where we felt like the music we'd spent all this time on and recorded so carefully together was being punished by trying to perform it live.

One day, Mike had a great idea. His idea was to never play again and I really liked the sound of that. So, he moved to LA and went on to score the Butterfly Effect, and I went down to my basement and drank beer for a few days, then wrote 15 songs, recorded them and had Mike Suby engineer the first 9 tracks and Karl Von Kries engineered the final 6 tracks as Mike was too busy conducting the Czechoslovakian Orchestra.

In June of 2002, "I'll be Performing as Myself" was released or I should say, it was duplicated 1000 times, mailed to me in a large box and quickly stuffed into my largest closet. I mailed one copy to the Director of Rolling Stone Magazine with a little note that read, "I hope you enjoy this" and then I got a letter from him a week later detailing that my album was, "Without a doubt the most refreshing album of music that I've heard in recent memory, a quietly majestic little gem as infectious as it is downright memorable." Then he called me and told me his kids were making a video for one of my songs and I should quickly register with BMI. He sent my discs to all the radio stations in Boston recommending that they play, "1982," and "Nothing Really Matters." 2 weeks later, I sold my house and moved to San Diego.

Almost 4 years and ten songs later, Mike Suby extended to me an expensive and exhausting invitation to come up to LA, stay in hotels, record and let him engineer my tunes. I accepted his offer to come up during the work week, eat dinner (each meal carefully prepared and tasting delicious) with his two children and wife from 5pm-to-7pm each night and record somewhere in between all his sound tracking and commercial spots. 6 months, 15 hotels and 46 car rides later, we finished. "From Sad to Ridiculous" says it all.