MY SONGWRITING STORY
My songwriting muses haven’t changed a wink since I was six years old: traveling, wanting to live freely, and girls.
The first full song I can remember writing was when I was in kindergarten. The song was called “When the Moon Touched the Stars,” which in retrospect is a level of druggy psychedelia that was far beyond my years and that I’ve yet to match since. The song was about a family of astronauts that takes off in their rocket on a trip to Jupiter but their rocket ends up crashing into a star or the moon or something else non-sensical. The melody was ripped straight from a song my dad’s country band often played at their concerts, which is plagiarism that would not fly nowadays. Six-year-old Joe would be sued to the Stone Age by the estate of Marvin Gaye for pulling stunts like that now. Times were different back then. Six-year-olds could rip off whatever melodies they wanted with almost no repercussions.
Little did I know I would soon stumble upon one of the most critical junctures in my songwriting journey: my mom introducing me to Microsoft Word. The idea of typing some plastic buttons on a keyboard, seeing my lyrics appear on the computer screen, and spending a sizable portion of my parents' disposable income on ink so I could print copies of my lyrics absolutely mesmerized me. I still didn’t know how to play an instrument, but I could write a melody in my head, type out the lyrics on Microsoft Word, print them out, and save them in my special blue binder of songs, and that was enough for six-year-old me.
Some of these songs age better than others, although “better” is extremely relative. “More Freedom Than This” was classic seven-year-old stuff about being sick of The Man holding you down and wanting to break free from the chains of tyranny placed on you by mommy. “Is That How Every Song Started?” was in retrospect a pretty meta piece about being made fun of for writing songs and asking myself if all great songs started with people reacting that way. “Travel the World” was me dreaming about falling in love and traveling the world with my girlfriend some day and about how there “weren’t enough chances for us in the world” whatever the hell that means. I cringe now, but I’m sure they’re not the worst songs ever produced by a first-grader.
I continued writing songs in this way throughout elementary school with the exception of one key process change: rather than printing my lyrics out, I would save them as a .txt file using Microsoft’s “Notepad” app and transfer them onto my iPod Nano so I could view them in its “Notes” app. This app was almost impressively dysfunctional given it only catered to people so determined to view their notes on the two-inch screen of their MP3 player that they would manually transfer them via iTunes. But I was that person. I didn’t want my family finding these files though, so to throw them off the scent, I would name the files something boring like “HP Print Lock” or “National Baseball Hall of Fame” or something, hoping they would be so unenthused by the file names that they wouldn’t even bother to open them. I don’t know if this worked. I don’t remember if anyone ever found them. I do remember that one of those songs was called “Reality” though, and even today I look back on it sometimes and think “Dang…that song was freaking fire.”
But I was only going to last so long writing melodies in my head without being able to play them on an instrument. When I was in 7th grade, I started saving up birthday and Christmas money to buy what to me was the Mona Lisa of toys: a MacBook Air. I finally (with a little help from my grandpa) had enough money to buy one in January 2012, and by that summer, I had played around with its GarageBand app enough to discover the free piano tutorials tucked away inside the main menu. I began studying these videos religiously. Like any American boy with fingers and a pulse, the first song I learned to play on piano was “Let It Be” by The Beatles, and soon enough I was composing my own stuff too.
The first songs I wrote on piano – “Brown Eyes,” “Queen of Hearts,” “Catherine (Love Will Win)” – were shockingly even worse than the songs I wrote before I could play an instrument. All of a sudden I was constrained by the straight jacket of chords and key signatures, and that produced God awful results at first. But this was still far better than writing songs where the instrumentals lived exclusively in my mind's ear. I even went as far as to make sheet music for some of these songs, although I quickly realized this was a useless activity since I suck at reading sheet music, and why would you write something down in a language you can't read?
And more importantly, being able to actually play piano opened the door for me to begin attempting to record songs. Please brace yourselves for the mid-pubescent ear assault you’re about to endure. The first song I ever tried to record was the aforementioned dime-a-dozen sappy love song “Catherine (Love Will Win),” and despite the piano intro being surprisingly passable, the 14-year-old singing it was nauseatingly not, which makes for a painful albeit occasionally entertaining listen now.
But by the time I started high school, I found my way around the piano enough to continue writing progressively better songs. Many of these never made it out of the “song snippet” stage where all I really had was a cool chorus. But whenever I had a moment of free time at my school, I would sneak into the “Piano Lab,” shut myself inside one of the soundproof practice rooms, and try to write something. If I was in class and got the bug, I would pull out a sheet of notebook paper and start writing lyrics instead of taking notes. Except, naturally, I didn’t want any of my classmates to be able to peer over at my desk and read the lyrics I was writing. After all, some of these songs were 100% about people in those classes…so to prevent this, I would write all of my song lyrics upside-down and inverted so you had to take the sheet of paper, flip it over, turn it upside down, and hold it up to a light to read the now legible words that showed through the paper. The scribbles looked about 70% Russian and 100% serial killer. It goes without saying that I did not have a girlfriend for the entirety of high school.
But in April of my freshman year, I wrote a song called “Alive.” Like most of my early songs, the best way to consume it now is with a pint of bleach, or at least a pallet cleanser immediately afterward. But it was the first time I finished a song, sang it back to myself, and thought, “Hey, this actually isn’t half bad.” I wrote the lyrics and chords into a little notes document and saved it in a folder of “Finished Songs,” the same folder I still use today. This is the oldest song in that folder.
One day at the start of my sophomore year, I was sitting at my dad’s girlfriend’s house when, fueled by a determination that was 10% desire and 90% boredom, I decided it was time to learn to play guitar. I grabbed my dad’s Ovation, locked myself in the computer room, and told myself, “I’m not leaving this room until I learn to play ‘Slide’ by The Goo Goo Dolls.” Within maybe an hour I had conquered the riff, which was all it took to make me fall in love with the instrument.
And so through some casual finger torture and a lot of Oasis covers, I slowly but surely learned my way around the guitar neck and soon discovered I was a much better songwriter on guitar than I was on piano. Something about the openness of a guitar chord felt much more like a blank canvas I could paint on than a piano chord. This is when the flood gates truly opened. Almost every week for the rest of high school I was working on something, and it was an extremely therapeutic exercise. I had great friends in high school but not a ton that I felt comfortable throwing any emotional baggage onto, and the guitar was great at supporting that weight. And the quality of the songs slowly got better. At first, writing a song that I actually categorized as “Good” felt more like a fluke than an intention. By the end of high school, I had a pretty comfortable folder of songs that I tagged as “Good,” and in some cases “Really Good,” and on rare occasions “Great.”
Inevitably, the question of, “What if someday I could record my own album?” became far too intriguing to not at least experiment with making some recordings. So occasionally, when the gravitational pull of this curiosity became too great, I would pick one of my better songs and start a little GarageBand project, trying to figure out all the tricks and techniques for turning good songs into good recordings.
At this point, your internal monologue is probably going, "This is the part where he says things started to click and his recordings started getting a lot better!" No. You're not over the hump yet. The results were, once again, certifiably crap. I didn’t have any proper equipment, I still couldn’t sing for squat, and the fact I recorded the vocal tracks into a USB microphone from the “High School Musical: Sing It!" PlayStation 2 game certainly didn’t help.
But I really didn’t care that the quality was trash. I was quite comfortable just writing songs for the sheer joy of writing songs. I didn’t have any real motivation or incentive to try and make good recordings. I never even told anyone I wrote songs as a hobby. Ever. It was entirely a private enterprise.
That changed in college. My friends at Notre Dame took a bit of an interest in my music talents and would regularly ask to have jam sessions or just hang out in my room so I could take requests and play songs. It was only a matter of time before one of them asked me on a spring break trip in LA if I ever wrote songs, to which I rightfully responded, "Yes." This didn’t seem like a mind-blowing revelation to me. If you’re into cooking, you eventually try to create your own recipes. If you’re into poetry, you eventually try to write your own poems. It seemed only natural to me that all musicians would at some point try to write their own songs. But nevertheless my friends were pretty surprised.
It was a few days later that while spending the night at an ocean-front rental house in Newport Beach, my friend Laura cornered me with my guitar and said, “Play me one of your songs.” This wasn’t a request. This was an order.
I decided to play a song I had finished a few months earlier called “My Beautiful Mind,” partly because I thought it was a really good song, but also because it felt like the first song somebody should hear from me. The lyrics are extremely personal and revealing. It was my equivalent of “This is Me” from Camp Rock, except I didn’t have a team of Disney songwriters telling me what “me” is, and I didn’t get to make out with Joe Jonas after the song was over.
I was a nervous wreck playing the song. I had to start over a few times because I couldn’t even sing the words without my mouth having an allergic reaction to the ears around me. But I got through it. It was good for me to play my songs for somebody else, and I think Laura knew it would be.
But I wasn’t in the clear yet. A few nights later, sometime around 3 am, Laura and my friend Guppy decided it was time to completely open the door to the vault, and I think I was ready to do it. I trusted them. The house we were staying in on this spring break trip had a little guest house in the back, and so I grabbed my guitar, and the three of us went out to this so-called apartment. Laura and Guppy sat down and said, “Alright. Play us everything you have.” It was already 3 am, and there was no way in hell any of us were staying up long enough to get through the dozens of finished songs I had by that point. But one by one I picked some of my favorites and played for them. “My Beautiful Mind.” “Stumble.” “Dizzy.” “Whiskey-Colored Yesterdays.” “December Snow.” “Forever Yesterday.” “Madman.” We tapped out at around 5:30 am. It felt great that they cared enough to want to listen. It felt great to be heard.
Naturally, I wrote a song about this night called “Naked.”
To my surprise, Laura and Guppy said they would love if I would record some demos of the songs I played so they could listen back to them, which I excitedly agreed to. At this point, making good recordings was still completely on the back burner for me. All I really cared about was writing good songs. But the fact anyone was showing any genuine interest in these songs was enough to make me want to at least record a basic guitar-and-vocal demo.
That night, I grabbed my guitar and laptop and headed over to Notre Dame’s music center to find a practice room to record these demos in, but to my dismay, all of the practice rooms were taken. I was too excited to leave the building having recorded nothing though, so I began aimlessly wandering through the hallways, ignoring any and all “Authorized Personnel Only” signs, and eventually I found a theater dressing room that would be more than adequate as a studio for the evening. So I shut the door, opened my laptop, and began knocking out tracks one by one using nothing but my crappy computer microphone (if that isn't obvious from the everything about the recordings). When I was finished, I exported all of the tracks as MP3s and, as an homage to the studio they were recorded in, listed “The Dressing Room” in the “Album Title” field. I sent them over to Laura and Guppy and spent the next few days on campus walking around with my iPhone speaker up to my ear, listening to my songs every spare moment I got.
Apparently my friends weren’t impressed by my computer microphone. A week or two later while we were hanging out in Guppy’s dorm room, they told me they had a surprise for me. As it turned out, they had gone behind my back, found a local recording studio in downtown South Bend, and set up a session for me to see how I liked recording there. I still have no idea what it cost them or any details about how they arranged this session.
It’s still the most thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me.
So the afternoon of April 7th, 2018, myself, Laura, Guppy, and my friend Leah headed down to UpState recording studio in downtown South Bend for my first session. I was in too much amusement at the idea of recording in an actual recording studio to really be nervous (although admittedly my voice was pretty croaky having lost it the night before at a school dance, which led me to spend the entire morning sucking lozenges and hovering over my steamer trying to improve at least from croaky to gravelly).
The session itself was pretty uneventful. I chose "My Beautiful Mind" as the song to focus on, but I only had an hour, so there wasn’t much time to dawdle around. I did maybe three takes of the guitar and a handful of runs at each vocal line, a level of efficiency that can only be accomplished when you’ll legitimately be kicked out of the studio if you do not finish in time. Within my hour, I finished a version of the song and played it for Laura, Guppy, and Leah over the studio monitors. It was alright. It definitely served its purpose of being a well-recorded version of a song I wrote. It was sufficient.
But I knew if I was going to get serious about recording, I was never going to go back to a recording studio. It cost way too much money that I didn’t have. And I knew I would never be able to properly recreate the sounds I heard in my head if I knew the studio clock was always ticking and I had to rush through the process as quickly as possible to avoid going bankrupt in studio costs. I wanted time to experiment and try things that didn't work and play around with them until they did work. I wanted to be an artist. I didn’t want to just make more sufficient recordings that served their purpose.
So I decided to try and learn everything myself. I picked up a few tips and tricks from my hour at UpState, and I figured everything else I could learn through the trifecta of trial-and-error, dumb luck, and YouTube. I knew it would take some time to learn, and I knew the early results would surely be less-than-stellar. But I was willing to commit to the process. I bought a Blue Snowball and a pop filter and went back to the dressing room to try and make some better recordings.
My routine was pretty standard: I would head to the dressing room around maybe 10 pm, shut the door and lock myself in, work for three or four hours trying to build in GarageBand all the sounds that I heard in my head, and finish around 2 am. It wasn’t a super sustainable sleep schedule, and I’m sure my roommate Spencer didn’t appreciate me waking him up every time I walked in the room at some ungodly hour of the morning. But I can hardly remember a better feeling in my life than that of walking out of the dressing room at 2 am, strolling across a perfectly still Notre Dame campus in the moonlight, and squeezing my ear up against my iPhone speaker to listen to the song I just recorded, feeling absolutely enamored with the results. I was making music. And I didn’t really care if the quality was still pretty dodgy or that my singing definitely still needed some work. It sounded magical to my ears.
The end result was The Dressing Room, a ten-track debut album that was in every sense of the phrase a DIY affair. I released it on August 5th, 2018, and sure, it didn’t exactly take the world by storm. I doubt almost anyone outside my immediate friend group and family listened to it. But it was mine. It was an album of my songs. And I loved it.
More releases followed, each of them as commercially unsuccessful as the next, but some of them being more significant steps as an artist than the others. My second album, “Goodnight, My Illiterate Crackhead,” was definitely a step in the right direction at crafting a more cohesive sound, although the singing still wasn't cutting it. “Jolene” was the first song I ever released where I thought the overall sound and production was actually impressive rather than just forgivable. “Isolation Rocks” was the first longer release that I felt could genuinely sit next to some of my favorite songs on a garage rock playlist and not feel extremely out of place.
And this all led up to “If You’re Reading This, Good Morning,” my third album that I consider the culmination of all these learnings. How to write great songs. How to get high-quality sounds from low-budget equipment. How to produce tracks so they sound great individually but even better in the context of a full album. And how to stop being embarrassed for making music and just own the craft.
I followed it up with my fourth album "Candidate for Cool" in June 2023, and I'm not sure I've ever been prouder of something in my life than that album. It's a body of work I'll forever stand behind.
By now, daydreaming melodies and printing out Microsoft Word pages with my lyrics at six years old feels like a lifetime ago, but I am still the same songwriter. That’s the one constant in my life. I’m just not afraid to share those songs anymore, and I hope I never stop.