Pianist, composer, producer, and arranger who last month released three full Christmas albums and has a fourth coming next month in the form of an audiobook. Under the banner of Studio 55, he also offers music production services, songwriting workshops, and record label services for aspiring musicians. He is a Hammond and Steinway Certified Artist and has also founded a non-profit called The Lighthouse Project, which he talks about here. His top five songs on Spotify alone have a combined total of almost 6.7 million streams and he was previously a guest on this show two years ago on Episode 510.
“I guess as you get older, you kind of revisit your childhood. And then your 20s and 30s and so on and so forth. And what does Christmas mean to you? And what does it mean to the older generation? What does it mean to the younger generation?”
“The feeling of Christmas, the joy of Christmas can not only be in the Christmas season but throughout the entire year.”
“I love Christmas music and … I go through every genre; I go through every style because everyone's got different musical tastes and everyone has a different background or lives in a different state or country. And this kind of more or less hits all the bullet points.”
“When you first start the project, the first five songs are probably the hardest because you get caught up in your own mind. You know, where's the direction going? Where do we think this is going to go? Where is that going to go? But then … you begin to challenge yourself. You begin to take on subjects and topics that you can hide within the context of the Christmas music, like losing a loved one or celebrating another holiday within the Christmas season, if that's not in your particular faith or whatever it be.”
“It evokes an emotion, it asks a question, it tells a story, and it makes us feel things that we didn't know we would feel and also can bring us to a resolute level of calmness and focus.”
“I'll definitely, definitely … be shopping the market to see what's out there and quite possibly who wants to feel the same vision that I felt.”
“You could take playing basketball, scraping your knee, and make that into a song about pain and suffering. It's thinking out of the box. It's taking something that is not ordinary and making it extraordinary.”
“Music has to have a strong front story, back story, and it really has to have staying power and the only way those songs have staying power are those that have a strong melody, have a strong vocal, have a purpose vocally, but also the rhythm section is the driving force. And the clarity and the colorfulness in the chords and the melody all have to work in tandem.”
“Music is universal but when you connect all these bits and pieces and you make it open, so everybody is able to interject their own feelings and their own experiences to the music that I put out there, it’s just a whole new experience.”
“Find out who you are, not who somebody wants you to be.”
“Christmas Forevermore”
“Angels at My Door”