Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, guitar player who has a new album coming out next week Friday, September 13th. He has been written about in the likes of PEOPLE Magazine and American Songwriter as well as interviewed on MSNBC. He has collaborated with GRAMMY nominee Aloe Blacc and he has also done a song featuring Dave Koz. The videos on his official YouTube channel have a combined total of more than 2.5 million views and a single that he released this past February has over 144 thousand streams on Spotify. He is a former CEO of Activision and Deutsch LA, where he led record-breaking launches for major franchises like Call of Duty and was named one of the 50 Most Creative People in Business by AdAge.
“That's the magical thing about songwriting is it's so personal and everyone has a different way of doing it.”
“For me, the writing process of music is almost completely disconnected from the lyric writing process. I kind of have two different creative tracks going in my mind at all times where I'm, every time I pick up a guitar, I'm hunting for hooks and chord progressions and melodies that I like.”
“It's really a sort of craftsmanship grind where I kind of piece it together one block at a time. For me it usually starts with a spark musically.”
“Everyone sort of has more time to sit with it and more time to iterate and more time to play and more time to polish and more time to try different things. And so, I found that you got a lot more creative engagement from other musicians using this approach because they get sort of hypnotized by it. And they get it in their minds and then they wake up the next morning with a different idea on how to approach the guitar or the cello or the bass or whatever musician is working on it. And then I just get these treasure troves of files back.”
“I struggled with learning disabilities and dyslexia… I couldn't read music.”
“I played violin pretty well for about 10 years. The violin is so hard. It is the most, kind of, mechanically difficult instrument. There's no frets. It's really a difficult instrument to play. When I picked up a bass, it came super natural to me. When I picked up a guitar, I was able to teach myself a lot of the basics of the guitar.”
“I created my own band, and I was hooked. Some version of that band stayed with me through all of high school, all of college, and well into my early years of my professional career, probably more years than was advisable from a professional standpoint as my advertising career was taking over. But I kept playing and kept going to clubs and everything.”
“I feel like for whatever reason, I'm someone who needed to live a lot of life to have something to say as a songwriter.”
“As I became more and more public as an executive… I became more and more private as an artist.”
“We all have the sort of thing in our head. We all know how we think it should be. But lots of times you have a core idea that's a spark. And when it meets someone else's flint, the flame travels in a surprising direction… You want to create an environment where people feel comfortable giving you their best work, giving you the thing that they think is going to make it magic.”
“Creative people sometimes, as they should, we tend to make our arguments from a place of passion. And businesses run, wherever they can, from a place of logic and predictability and good, sound research.”
“I'm a big believer that the worst thing for creative ideas is a bunch of people who agree. Things really get electric when you find people who have a dissenting opinion, and when I can't find one, I go looking for it.”
“Day One”
“The Most Beautiful Boy”