Your debut album, Marionette, shows a very mellow guitar-driven sound that can be equated to the likes of Elliott Smith with a hint of John Mayer thrown into the musical blender. Did you go into the studio with a particular sound in mind? Who do you feel may have influenced your sound? I was a singer first and foremost, starting with musical theater and classical in high school, and then spending a while in a Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Temptations phase before I decided to even attempt songwriting. At that point, I immersed myself in music by people like John Mayer,
Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, and Ben Folds. So while this got me interested in song construction, music theory, and chord progressions (all of these guys tend to use a lot of not-too-common progressions), I couldn’t, and still can’t, help but approach each song from a singer’s perspective. I was drawn to melody, so I created songs that are enjoyable for me to sing. Every track on my album began as just vocals and acoustic guitar, and the instrumentation developed organically during the recording process. I had some ideas going in for how I wanted each to be constructed and built, but almost all of those ideas were
scrapped once I started putting everything together and hearing how the instrumentation changed the feel of the songs. I had only vague ideas of what the “final product” would be when I walked into the studio. How do you feel that Marionette describes you as an artist? This is my debut album. I’m still fairly new to songwriting and to me the entire writing process was a gigantic learning experience. Everything was written over the course of a year in which I, for really the first time in my life, felt like I was “putting myself out there,” and learning to cope with the anxiety and self-