PART ONE

Music was not my first art form. It was my third. But it was the one that somehow turned into a career.

My first dance with any of the arts was with drawing. I started drawing around 8 years old. I was good for my age and I could copy what I saw with some accuracy. I mostly pulled from comic books, video games, 90s anime and Dungeons and Dragons manuals, and I drew all the time. In high school I started studying more traditional forms of drawing and painting, and I came to enjoy portraits and figures. I was getting good, and some of my work was getting attention. And then abruptly I stopped. Exactly why is a long story, but for a quick summary: I had a dramatic falling out with my art teacher, and in the aftermath art turned from something that I could really lose myself in to something that chafed. I would occasionally doodle or make some low-commitment pieces, but nothing that required any real emotional investment.

It was in that vacuum that my second art form arrived. 

I was in late high school when I discovered how much I loved books. I’d previously read some novels that I enjoyed, but I was 16 when I found my first true page-turner and learned how intoxicating a good book can be. I quickly changed from a casual reader to a devoted one, and it wasn’t long before I wanted to write a book myself. So I did, just after graduating high school. 

I had no interest in higher education. I didn’t particularly enjoy school, and college was so cost prohibitive that I never gave it any honest consideration. I come from a huge family (I’m one of ten children) and grew up below the poverty line. Concepts like university felt entirely out of reach to me. But that was a major part of what attracted me to writing – it all cost the same, no matter the scale of your ideas. Most mediums are directly affected by your finances. Big ideas require big budgets. But with writing, concepts covering thousands of years and hundreds of characters were no different financially than ones following one person for a single day. I was only limited by what I could effectively communicate. That concept was very freeing. I’d finally found an art form that didn’t constantly remind me of how broke I was.

So I wrote. I entered online short story competitions frequently. I volunteered at a writing workshop for a few years. I went to 24-hour diners, ordered a cheap side so they wouldn’t kick me out, and invented backstories for other customers in my notebook. I wrote every day, for at least 6 hours, and a year later I finished my first novel. I was more proud of its completion than its quality, so I immediately started a second one, knowing it’d be a big improvement with all I’d learned. I was nearly done with it – a fantasy story about a boy who fell through a puddle and found a mirror of our world that had evolved into totally different directions – when I lost everything. 

One morning, I sat down to begin writing and my computer wouldn’t boot. This was my first computer, so I didn’t understand what that meant yet. When I was told the hard drive had failed and my data couldn’t be salvaged, I learned, in a terribly brutal way, why it’s so important to back up your work. Over fourty short stories and two novels had evaporated overnight. I broke the computer with a hammer. 

Not sure what to do with myself (I was working at a bookstore at the time), I began saving for another computer. But outside of work and saving, I didn’t know where to put my energy. So I returned to what I think of as my third art form – music. 

I say returned, because music is something I fooled around with for years while I was more focused on painting and writing. 

I first started playing when I was 10 years old. I found an old guitar in my parent’s attic, left there, I assume, by the previous owners. An attic in Florida is no place for an instrument and it was a very cheap guitar to begin with; the neck was so warped that the rusty strings hovered a full inch over the fretboard. It hurt too much to press any of the strings down, so I wrote songs by twisting the tuning pegs to change notes. My old friend, Mark Hubbard, wanted to play drums, so we constructed a drum set out of buckets and baskets, two small curtain rods masquerading as drum sticks. As you might imagine, this sounded terrible. But it was a lot of fun! We enjoyed our first attempt at a band for a couple months, then, as kids do, we forgot about it and moved on to new ways of killing time. 

I returned to the idea of playing music a few years later. It was the summer between middle school and high school when, while walking to Mark’s house, I heard a friend's band practicing in their garage. I peered through the window and watched for a while, never alerting anyone to my presence. They were obviously still figuring out their songs, and it was all pretty rough around the edges, but that’s precisely what struck me. They were just doing it anyway! You could just start a band and figure it out as you went. I always thought you had to take lessons, or have some kind of formal training. Otherwise, you were like us a few years ago – two random kids with buckets and rusty strings, just making noise. But I saw that wasn’t true. Their band already sounded a bit like music we bought and listened to. 

By the time I arrived at Mark’s house, I’d already formed my proposal. What if I got an electric guitar, and he got a drum set, and we started a band? Mark was onboard and his birthday wasn’t too far off. So he begged for a drum set, and I started mowing lawns to buy an electric guitar. Once we’d both gotten our instruments of choice, I quickly learned how quiet electric guitars were. We still played, with Mark covering his drums in t-shirts and practice pads and playing incredibly softly, until I had the money for a tiny practice amp. 

I was just beginning to play guitar in a normal fashion (holding down the strings instead of turning the pegs), but already I wanted to write my own music. Everyone told me I should learn some songs first, so I learned how to play Smells Like Teen Spirit and Come As You Are from Nirvana, but I stopped after that. Instead, I would play along with recordings I liked, making up my own riffs and harmonies over top of them. I still have no idea why this was my impulse, but in hindsight I think it really helped me develop my ear. To this day, melodies and arrangements are the easiest part of songwriting for me – lyrics and structure take far more time. But I eventually came up with a few songs, and Mark and I were improving quickly. Then came high school. 

High school was one of the hardest periods of my life. I got kicked out of my home after coming out when I was just shy of 15 years old. I already had a job as a dishwasher at a Japanese steak house, but I suddenly needed all the hours I could get. I often went multiple weeks in a row without a day off, which wasn’t legal, but I was getting paid under the table so no one noticed. During summers, I worked two jobs and saved as much as I could. 12 hour work days were my norm. I was still very serious about visual art during this time, but I was lonely. Spending more time alone didn’t appeal to me very much, so I found myself playing in lots of bands. 

All during high school I joined groups on instruments I didn’t even know how to play. Practices gave me a place to go when I wasn’t working, and people my age to be around, so I said yes to any offer. During that period, music, painting and skateboarding were the only activities that could distract me from my situation. I was deeply ashamed of my sexuality and terrified of it being discovered, and even resorted to self-harm in an attempt to force out any sexual thoughts. But when I was drawing, practicing or listening to a really great record, I forgot all of that. In those moments I wasn’t just some terrified kid, always saving for when I had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. I was able to lose myself in those activities, and for brief but vital snatches of time, I was present. 

It was during this time that I think art turned into a sort of savior for me. It was something I could turn to when life was too overwhelming, and it centered me in a way that nothing else did. When I had a song to learn or a drawing to finish, I had something to think about beyond my fears and general lack of a future. And it was around this time that I first dipped my toe into the world of recording. Whenever I could manage to borrow a 4-track cassette machine, I would record songs that I never shared with anyone. They were something private, where I could express myself freely. And since they could only be played back on a 4-track, they felt safe. I recorded lots of songs like these and I had a wonderful time. I have no record of those songs; the tapes are long gone. But I never intended for them to be heard, so that feels appropriate.

Something I learned during this period was that I largely did not enjoy being in a band. I didn’t realize just how social a lot of music was until I started playing with others. While I definitely appreciated the company and having a place to go, I was still predominantly there to work on songs and improve. I remember getting frustrated quickly, often wishing it was more about finding good results than simply feeling good. I could see where other people were coming from, and why they’d enjoy a more casual approach, but that didn’t suit my disposition. I have always been very serious about my interests, even when I was very young. I’m still that way. I like to truly understand things, to know why they work on a fundamental level. This made band practices, which were typically more about hanging out, pretty frustrating. It’s no fun being the most serious person in the room. But it was better than being alone, so I just bit my tongue until, eventually, I was no longer enjoying it enough and I quit.

So when did music really click for me?

After losing all of my writing, just shy of 21, I found myself playing guitar and piano more than I had in years. I didn’t have the heart to start another book, and it would be at least 6 months of saving before I could get another computer. I still had no desire to paint, and I’d also seriously injured myself a few years before and could no longer skateboard (a back injury that haunts me to this day). So music was all I had left. But this time I approached it differently. When I looked back on my former years, I realized that I’d enjoyed recording more than any other aspect. So I came up with an idea. 

Instead of a band, what if I started a recording project? What if writing and tracking songs was the sole focus, not band practices and social scenes? What if we played shows to share the recordings, instead of playing shows in hopes of being able to one day make a record?

I’m sure this sounds obvious nowadays. With recording equipment being so comparatively affordable and widely available, that’s how most musicians start now. But at the time, home recording was just coming online and most people thought of it exclusively as a way to make demos. No one I was around took it seriously. But I did, and the thought of making entire records at home was really exciting. I really wanted to prove that records could be made in less than ideal settings – that the important thing was writing effective songs. So I reached out to the only other person that I knew enjoyed recording as much as I did. And that’s when Alex Kane and I started working together. But I also had a lot of solo songs I wanted to record, and I had a strong pull to write both acoustic and electronic driven music. So I decided to split my more acoustic songs into a solo project, and the more electronic ones into the project with Alex. And with that, Radical Face and Electric President were born.

That was back in 2002. After three years of constantly recording and personally mailing CD-Rs to anyone who wrote through my website, both projects got signed to a label in Berlin in 2005. Since then, music is largely what I’ve done with my life. 

But since this section of the story really just pertains to how this all started, I’ll stop here. I’ll share the story of learning the profession in part two.