After graduating college in 2010, I got to work - writing and co-writing all the time, playing and touring in bands, playing for other people's bands, working in coffee shops all over town.
I didn't try out for bands when I was younger. I got into guitars intensely a couple of years into playing so much by the time I was graduating high school I was accepted into Berklee College of Music.
I've always been a fan first and foremost - obsessing over bands and seeking out bands, and spending hours and hours listening. When I played music, the scope of my fandom became more myopic; I was focusing on the bands we were touring with, or the bands on the label. And you're always positing yourself in relation to other bands. Since I haven't been playing, I feel a little less cynical. I'm able to seek out music and approach it strictly as a fan.
I spent thousands of thousands of hours playing the piano, and by thousands of hours, I mean playing in cover bands or wedding bands or disco bands or original bands or playing cabaret for Todd McKenney.
I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock 'n' roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.
I started writing songs for youth theater and stuff, and so it's really writing music for the stage that started me out, but then I eventually went to music college and did a two-year course in contemporary music and then just played in endless bands, cover bands, jazz bands.
I played in rock bands in college and then right out of college I moved over to Europe and lived in Ireland for about four years playing in indie rock bands. I love and miss being in a band, I still am in a band but pursuing that as a career I definitely missed it but I felt like that ship had sailed.
When I was a kid, I was playing in various bands - amateur bands, garage bands, weekend bands, you name it, around the area. At some point, I just wanted to try the whole 'Beatle tribute band' thing, so I found a local band that was doing that.
In the 80s there weren't so many bands around and nowadays there are a lot more bands around. I think sometimes there are too many bands. But there are a lot of interesting young bands around. They are not really playing the classic metal stuff, that's up to the old bands.
I was playing in other rock bands. Any of those bands didn't last long.
There are so many bands that after their second record are headlining music festivals, and they're still... suited to playing in a tent. Very few bands when they headline a festival can pull it off.
High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.
Many people in the neighborhood liked hip-hop and house music, and I couldn't play that. You can't perform that on guitar or drums, which was what I was playing, at the time. But, I got so much from mariachi bands that were constantly playing in the neighborhood.
I took a private lesson, but it didn't really work out, so I went back to playing along with records. That's really the thing that got me into playing a lot - getting excited about playing along with my favorite bands like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
I think there are plenty of good bands out there, but the great bands aren't affected by what's going on around them, trends and all that and competing with other bands and wanting to be the biggest, we find that happens a lot. Bands look at other bands and think: that's what I want, you know? I think that remaining.
People always think I was just playing in a piano bar, but I only did that for about six months. The rest of the time I was playing in bands.
You never know that this is the moment when you're in the moment. When I was sixteen I moved to a smaller town in Vermont, and at that time I didn't have a band to play in. So I was forced to play in Top 40 bands and fraternity bands and wedding bands. That was all pop music, but I was listening to Weather Report and classical music. Then I went to Berklee College of Music in 1978, and you had Victor Bailey there, and Steve Vai. And suddenly I was among my ilk.