Oklahoma-based singer, songwriter, guitar player who released a TWENTY song album at the beginning of September. He actually has two other releases on iTunes that have THIRTY songs each. He has worked on many films and TV shows, having just finished contributing music to the film "Sound of Freedom." He also does engineering and production and has partnered with TASCAM over the last couple years. (He also thanks Dan Wistrom, who played steel on both songs heard on this episode as well as much of the new album.)
"When you have the opportunity to release through (iTunes), my thought was always, why not make it a vast collection of songs."
"From A to Z for the past ten years all this has been recorded solely by myself, I suppose you could say. I mean, I've had, of course, quite a bit of help with some of the instrumentation."
"I was actually enrolled to go to the University of Washington for a master’s program in art, and, painting specifically. But a friend of mine came back to me and said, 'Hey, I'm moving to Los Angeles. You wanna go?' And I said, 'Well, I'm kinda tired of school. I think I might enjoy that.' ... That was really the impetus, truly, to just focus on music once I arrived there and that's what I did."
"(I) picked up the guitar as a teenager and that's when I really started songwriting and did that through college. It was a great experience to sort of explore that and meet other people and really be exposed to different ideas... And that was a springboard to go to Los Angeles and I was very excited when I got there 'cause there were quite a few things that I'd never even seen or heard of that really inspired me."
"That sort of led into building the instruments to create these sounds... My friend... and I started a DIY band and it was really just a bass built from a washtub and... oil can guitars, any variation of junk that could be put together to make melodic sounds and it worked out fairly well."
"Any digital distributor charges you the same amount of money per release. So, to release 15 albums individually, I thought it might be economically wise to sort of combine these songs... and make it more accessible for folks that aren't that familiar with me, 'cause my fans either that've known me, have been with me for years, they've got all those individual records, but I don't expect the general public that's unfamiliar with my work to go through that."
"Sadly enough a lot of these venues are not going to survive (because of the pandemic). The smaller clubs and even a lot of the festivals are probably going to suffer. They were canceled this year. We did the Woody Guthrie Festival online, which I participated in the last four or five years and that's unfortunate."
"Part of the impetus is to just show people, especially the youth, that you don't need to have a three thousand-dollar guitar. You can play just fine on a hundred-dollar guitar."
"I love being able to take sometimes even younger artists that are just starting out that really want to have a demo or have a real simple EP produced, that's a passion of mine, to get young voices out there."
"If anything helped the videos succeed, I hope it was just the visual content combined with the music. I really have had a big love of film my entire life and so that's been a joy for me to combine those two elements and share them with folks... Hopefully that shows through."
"As soon as we had an opportunity to partner with New High Recordings, which is who we put out both of these vinyl releases with, we took advantage of that 'cause it's always been a dream of mine to do that."
"I think music is so imperative and works so well as a communication tool because we all have those same sentiments and if we can share them with each other, that's all the more powerful and that's why I love the form."
"Snakes"
"Wish This World"
** Bonus content with RT Valine **