He fronts the indie pop band Manuel The Band, a group that has earned rave reviews from the likes of Music Connection Magazine, Coachella Valley Weekly, and OC Weekly. They have a new song coming next month, having released four singles throughout 2025, and continued performing regularly throughout southern California, including the fabled Hotel Café in Hollywood – among numerous other venues and events – and they performed up in northern California at the Mountain Vibe Music Festival. The band has well over 57 thousand monthly listeners on Spotify, where their top five songs alone have a combined total of more than a million-and-a-half streams.
“My band operates in many ways like six brothers, essentially. It's very much a family.”
“It's good to … do what you want to do and have fun with it, whatever feels good. But I think it's also good to keep an ear open. And if you have people that you surround yourself with that you trust and that you care about and you love like a family, then they're probably on to something (with their suggestions).”
“My mom… said, ‘Okay, I’ll make you a deal… if you play piano, if you take lessons for five years, after that you can play whatever you want’.”
“I joined the steel drum band after that, and then I did some mini tours with them throughout the east coast.”
“I think anybody tuning into any creative world now understands that content is king. And so, I think the goal was just to consistently have stuff to like, put out. And, being music, we wanted to do music.”
“I think having a producer and an engineer that you really vibe with is, that's been really crucial to us.”
“Some of the better songs that, I think they're a little bit more meaningful to us in the sense that we really just took them apart, ripped them to shreds, and created something I think that was a lot more us.”
“Music, I feel like just exposes you to a wide range of so many different and unique people, both in the industry as well as just in crowds.”
“Sounds cliche, maybe, but I think the thing I, personally, had to learn was to not take everything so seriously.”
“I do think, honestly, the pandemic had a lot to do with a very sudden shift in the mentality… because when the pandemic hit, we had like this kind of new band high… the, like, kind of, ‘who is this’ factor going on? Which was really, really cool to experience that.”
“I'd like to say I'm a musician's musician. Meaning, I know how to put up six speakers and play the show for four hours and do the whole thing, travel to X destination. And I think sometimes that can become, like, the job aspect can make you a little jaded in some sense, but I also think that's the best way to cut your teeth on things, just like you're forced to in many ways just learn songs on the spot or play them on the spot. Like kind of really test your skills… but I also think it leaves you as a much smarter and sharper musician.”
“Sometimes you don't even realize that what you're doing is actually helping somebody.”
“Don’t Count On Me”
“When You’re Gone”