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espite having eleven thousand followers on SoundCloud, with songs reaching over 225 thousand plays, Joey Pecorero does not have the classical training one might expect. While in high school he dabbled in several forms of music—including a brief stint playing guitar in a screamo band— before discovering jazz music. His inherent aptitude for making music prompted him to start messing around on a keyboard as well as with his brother’s music production software, Abelton Live. With those first small steps, he began producing jazz music himself. “I started writing a bunch of jazz music. I literally cannot read music, but I would just take it one step at a time. Like cookiecutter style, just hit a note and if I liked how it sounded I’d hit another one.” Around senior year of high school, Pecorero became consumed with making music. He began forgoing his academic responsibilities to compose and produce his own unique sound.
“You could say it was wasting time because I bombed all of my exams and I didn’t do my homework,” Pecorero said. “But I had formulated this really farfetched dream that I would play shows and tour and have people know me who didn’t know me.” Pecorero’s ambitions were realized when he started to receive positive feedback from friends and family. So much so that friends prompted him to post his music on a burgeoning music sharing platform called SoundCloud. Soon enough, his sound gained the recognition of fans worldwide, including an associate agent from the Windish Agency. The agent flew from Chicago to Birmingham, Michigan to meet with Joey at a local Starbucks and convince him he should start playing live shows. At this point, Joey’s dream of becoming a professional, touring artist was starting to become incompatible with his parents’ wish for him to get a degree. “So [this agent] comes over to my house and sits down with my parents and says ‘I think your son has a shot, he could do this.
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