Happiness starts with us

  We are a group of music lovers striving to change the world with our music. 

I am an anomaly. My situation is not normal, or planned. I don't have the same goals as 99% of everyone else. 

I've been performing in school and community choirs since I was 4, but my first big task as a singer was being in the opera Tosca at 7 years old. I started playing guitar at 12, and began writing songs soon afterward. when I was 16 I recorded my first 10 song album, and had been awarded 25 Unanimous Superior awards in CMEA Bay Section festivals in solo and ensemble groups. I was selected to State and Regional honor choir twice, and at the same time had a deep love for Jimi Hendrix, Green Day, and Metallica. 

I am a Veteran of the Airborne Infantry, I served in Iraq in 2006-2007 with the 3/509th Airborne Infantry Regiment. My story is that of pain and death, for everyone and everything around me, some just took 10 years to feel it, some... Immediately. I hated and loved the experience, but the results were, 5 years after ETS, I finally got the disability for PTSD that I had earned through my service to this country. All the while I had my guitar with me. 

I took my Post 9/11 GI bill and gave it to Musician's Institute in Hollywood, and in 2012 I set out to be a working musician and audio engineer in LA. And when I realized that I could be the main songwriter, the performer, the audio engineer, becoming the producer became available once I had the money to pay for services to execute a dream- and that was to make a band that could be punk, grunge, and metal, and had a place to write songs about the true to life experiences that had made me who I am. In 2011, I named it The Quarantined to represent the separation I saw coming, and to allude to the cages that we all live in, perceivable and not. 

WIth The Quarantined, I got two great friends from music school and I signed to a sub-major label in 2015, nominated for an independent music award and an International music award (Ireland) in 2016, and still sold under 300 copies. From all the live shows, the interviews, the community was what drove me to do more, I was a terrible salesman, but a great singer and guitarist with a vision. 

I left LA in 2017 because I could feel the city becoming way the fuck worse than even when I had arrived, and listening to the people who had been there before me gave me no shelter from the reality that the rewards to being in LA that was available to me with my disability was not any greater than from somewhere else. PTSD was liability for most because they didn't understand it. 

I get to create music without the need to sell anything, but the desire to say what I can to shape the world into something I could be proud of. Thats what makes me different from anyone else- I lived and learned a life that spans continents, lived in mansions and slept on the streets, been rich in company, love, loneliness, and sadness. I driven across the country 7 times now myself, and seen more than I ever bargained for. I've got the freedom everyone so desperately wishes for, and mostly what it brings is sorrow at how it will never happen for way too many. 

My clients are the people who I chose to work with, and I'm lucky that I have full authority over that choice, because I didn't always have that. I still have to fight for the rights to my own music from managers I hired who stole it prior to release. I have fans from coast to coast, and I've got some haters too, but I make more fans everywhere I play. 

I live by the Army values, and anyone who works with me knows it because its what I do, more so than talk. I get to bring that element of honor back to an industry that is justly becoming more of a network than a monolith. 

Now, I get to focus on the art of making music, the art of vocalization, how to pack a phrase of music with as much feeling and emotional content as possible, learning and growing every day, and all the techniques to tell those stories with a guitar. I get to take that to every audience I go to, and share in their feelings that inevitably get experienced- The love IN the music, through the pain. Thats what I get to do, and I wouldn't rather do anything else.