Tell us who you are

I was born and raised in Nashville, TN with natural singing/songwriting talent, so I was exposed to the music industry at a young age and offered some opportunities to enter it. I chose instead to go to college at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, where I met Matt and Adam and started The Shadowboxers, a soul/pop band with our three voices in harmony defining our sound.

During our time at Emory we played all kinds of school functions and parties, logging countless hours harnessing our craft and defining our sound. Eventually we seeped out into the Atlanta music scene, where we met the Indigo Girls and their manager, and in May of 2011, just weeks after graduating, we went on their North American tour as their opener. For two years we opened for the Indigo Girls, the second year also serving as their backing band, so by 2013 we’d already amassed tons of live show experience and an extensive catalogue of original songs, and we were ready to try our luck on our own. We started a YouTube cover series in the fall of 2013 as a way of maintaining that momentum while figuring out our next move, and one of our videos was a version of Justin Timberlake’s Pusher Love Girl, which he somehow saw and tweeted about.

From there, he reached out to us personally and expressed his interest in taking us under his wing. This began the next phase of our career, as we shifted our focus to writing songs, sending them to Justin, and awaiting his feedback. We did this for three years, incubating in our home studio, writing hundreds of songs, developing our self-production skills, and playing headlining tours along the way to our growing fan base, until 2017, when we finally landed on the music that would be the next evolution of our sound. We went into the studio with Justin for three weeks and recorded Apollo, a bold, slick, power-punch of a pop record, and in 2018 we released Apollo and opened for Justin on his worldwide Man of the Woods tour.

Though the experience was incredibly rewarding and offered tremendous amounts of exposure, we lost our identity in the midst of it, and came off the road at the end of 2018 looking to find it. We moved to Los Angeles at the end of 2018 and amicably parted ways with Justin and his artist development company, removed ourselves from the other contracts we’d been associated with, and shrunk our team down to just us and a manager – the most bare-bones we’d been since college. Now completely independent, we fought to record our own album, which caused many rifts and identity crises, and pushed me towards considering a solo career.

After a year of recording, we came out of the tunnel with The Slow March of Time Flies By, an album that answered our question: for a band that’s been influenced by so many different artists and genres, what happens if we make music with no one else in the room? We all are incredibly proud of the answer, and desperately needed to find it. It’s hard to know when the seeds of my solo musical pursuits were planted. A case could be made that they’ve always been there…but the urge to act on it became much more apparent on the road with Justin and thereafter.

As the band’s frontman and principle songwriter, I felt that I wasn’t able to get everything out with The Shadowboxers, and began the process of finding another home for my creativity in 2019. I tried working with various producers, but I never felt like the results landed in the bullseye of what I am and wanted to say. It wasn’t until the pandemic of 2020, when I was quarantined in my apartment, that I found it. With limited solo recording experience (I was dependent on the technical recording skills of the other band members), I began writing and recording songs simply, with no intention of building them out. Then I added to them, and added more, and eventually I created full productions that were the pure embodiment of my tastes and identity. And that’s where I stand now – with a full-length album of solo material, all self-written and self-produced, ready to show the world who I am.

Who are you and how did you become an artist?

I am a singer/songwriter at heart – an old soul who gravitates towards melodies and chords and complicated musicality that seems simple. I became an artist because I started listening to Michael Jackson, EWF, George Benson, Simon & Garfunkel, and Elton John, and I wanted to play the songs I was so in love with.

Is this release your most representative work?

Yes. Not even close.

Any funny anecdotes from the time you were recording or writing the song/album?

I lived close to the airport when recording this album, and often times while recording a plane would fly overhead. Most of the time it would ruin the take, but occasionally it would create a unique ambiance that I used throughout the record. 

Top 3 dream collaborations

John Mayer Kacey Musgraves Greg Phillinganes

What’s a record that shaped your creativity?

Continuum

Who is an artist or band you look up to these days?

Brandi Carlile

Is this song a piece of a future project?

Yes. I have a full album’s worth of material, all self-written and produced over the past year and a half.

What does music mean to you?

Music means connecting and relating to the world. Without it, the pieces don’t fit.

How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard you?

Soulful singer/songwriter