Bio

AmadeuS. Born 1976. Virgo.

Bachelor of Arts Degree, December 2000

Major: Music

You may be familiar with the phrase, "stick to what you're good at". Well, from a very young age I was good at and destined to be a performer.

When I was 5 years old I would do the "Wild and Crazy Guy" skit from SNL in the salon where my mother would get her hair done. I have always had a unique propensity for being able to cite lines, monologues, and dialogues from movies with ease. That would allow me to say and do things, like swear and perform lewd gestures, because "Hey, I'm only quoting (insert movie title here)".

I started taking piano lessons in 4th grade at the demand of my mother and the chagrin of myself. I could play single note tunes by ear but was quickly wrangled into the regimented world of reading notes which like most things in my life would end up closing me off to a larger world. The real world. A football game is usually decided by one or two key plays... Life too is decided by key moments.

My sophomore year in high school I had speech class. The teacher (Ms. K.) liked what she saw and encouraged me to try out for the theatre productions. That spring when they did the musical Grease I cowered and didn't try out. My mother convinced me to ask Ms. K. to allow me to come to callbacks. Most directors would tell you to go take a flying flark at a rolling doughnut, but Ms. K. allowed it and that moment forever changed my destiny. Because of that audition I got cast as an extra, and subsequently landed the lead role in every show I was in. The music director (Mr. C.) was the choir teacher and asked me to join, which got me into all of the extra curricular performances including earning numerous gold medals in State Solo & Ensemble events. This lead to "National Choral Award", and a college scholarship for Theatre Performance.

My main goal was to get my degree as a science teacher with a theatre minor so I could teach high school and direct high school shows after I had done my share of acting. My parents (agreeably) didn't want to shell out the kind of money they were paying for the grades I was getting, so instead of getting better grades I, like any young person, transferred schools so I could continue to party. Upon transferring to that school I did poorly in a couple of science classes and due to the beauty of a girl in my choir I wrote the song "Oh How I Wish" by ear in November of 1996. That Christmas break, after writing the musical backbone to "Place Your Wager" I received a book on music theory as a gift. This was another defining moment in my life, as all the music that had ever transcended my cochlea began to unravel and make perfect sense. Using my new found knowledge I wrote the song "Corroded Veal". Like Luke Skywalker stretching out with The Force for the first time, I had transcended into a world which, until then, was non-existent to me. With my interest in science waning and my new found clarity into the realm of music, I decided that this was the path that would forever dominate my destiny. I switched majors and never looked back.

In the spring of 1997 I got my folks to co-sign a loan for me to the "tune" (get it?) of $2300.00 to purchase an Ensoniq MR-76 Performance/Composition keyboard. It was the top of the line model next to one that Korg had put out, (it amazes me that I somehow paid it off by the end of the year on a bartender's salary and a penchant for beer, grass, and ass.) but in 1997, a $2300.00 module still had a very limited array of realistic instrument sounds. No matter. For this was the piece of equipment I needed to be able to arrange my songs to give people at least a general idea of what was going on in my noggin. Or so I thought. Though it's intent was to record the tracks to enable other musicians to learn the songs faster, it ended up being my backup band for solo debuts at open jams.

By June of 1997, shortly before my 21st birthday I had enough songs written to justify making an album consisting of 12 tracks. I decided to copyright it myself and had to figure out what to call it. Since I abhor self titled albums and am not fond of using song titles as album names I decided to try something I thought was clever and that (as far as I knew) no one had ever done before. Much like you can't get the "rookie of the year" award your 7th season I had no other choice but to name it Debut Album. You always hear the announcer say "So and So's debut album, blah blah blah", so I thought it would be funny to hear "AmadeuS's debut album... Debut Album".

With the tracks placed and the album cover design finished I started looking for musicians and recording studios I could afford. During this time I wrote the song "Somewhere" in July, shortly after I got the album cover tattooed on my right arm (7-7-97). Despite the fact that it would make the album an unlucky 13 tracks long I decided to include it. It was a good song and I didn't know how many songs I had in me so I didn't want to save it for a later album that might never be (and almost wasn't) written. With the year winding to a close I had to make a recording for the Copyright Office but had no money or equipment in which to do so. Musicians were either into Death Metal or nowhere to be found, and recording studios were scarce, expensive, and quite frankly not what I was looking for. Someone I worked with was dating a guy who had a mini-disc recorder (new technology at the time) that he could modify to record my vocals over my keyboard tracks, then put them on a cassette tape. So one rainy October afternoon I did all 13 tracks (yes, 13 tracks in one day) to get it into the Copyright Office before the year's end. It was to be my only recording, and the only record of its existence for the next decade.

My last year of college I was turned onto a new and powerful recording program called ProTools with their Digi001 hardware interface. I was still on the lookout for musicians so in order to bypass the "middle-man" of the recording studio when I (never) DID find them, I cashed out my savings to buy the program and a brand new Mac G4 to run it. Dual 500Mhz processors, 512 MB of RAM, Mac OS 9, graphics card, speakers, a CD burner, and all the bells and whistles to the tune of $5000.00. (Remember, it was 1999.) I put $2000.00 down and ordered it. But a swindling retailer, who shall remain nameless (American TV and Appliance), jipped me out of my warranty, my DVD RAM drive, and would only finance $1200.00 of it. AFTER I had ordered it, AFTER waiting 3 weeks past the 2 week delivery time I had been told, and AFTER putting almost half of the money down, in cash. Bennys to be exact. Well, since I HAAAD to have this thing, I maxed out my credit card, and set to work on finding musicians and learning to become a home-studio recording artist. The only problem was, I didn't have a the first clue how, and the tutorials may as well have been written in Sanskrit. Back then the internet was still referred to as the "World Wide Web" and the "Information Superhighway", so forums and tech support weren't that supportive. Over the next few years my Mac would become my "sword in the stone". Forgotten, lost to time, and keeping me grounded in a mountain of debt. I finished college with five figures worth of school loans, $7.63 left on my credit card, no direction, no girlfriend, and a part time job hosting karaoke shows... in bars.

After college I was dragged by a riptide into a deep ocean of alcohol. Writing a song here and there but continuously spiraling downward into a hellish waste, succumbing to the reality that a college degree only gets you so far when it comes to the jobs you really want. Much of the drinking had to do with the fact that every musician I know can get a band together and come up with (usually crappy) songs and yet I couldn't get people to play what was already on the printed page. A curse that still haunts me to this day.

On June 25th, 2007 I conceded to the fact that I had been beaten. I had lost the battle, the front, and the war against alcohol. Realizing that fact and accepting the notion that in order to keep breathing I could never take another sip, I swept away the remnants of the Old Republic and started down a new path. I quit my job, threw caution to the wind, and then pissed into it.

I decided to go back to school for my Masters Degree so I took the necessary classes to enroll in the program. At my new job, a big-hearted man named Frank took an old, old tape that had been sitting in my car(s) for years, in the hot summer sun and the bitter winter cold, and made it into a CD. It was my old Debut Album recording I had done that rainy October day all those years ago. Its all I had and its what you hear on some of the preview tracks in the "Music" link at the top and bottom of this page. I handed burned copies to a few of the guys I worked with who were musicians and was completely blown away when I heard them listening to it over and over and singing lines from it. This, coupled with a few other events, sparked a new writing frenzy that I once again completed in a matter of months. (These events are scribed in each song's story icon in the "Music" link.) I decided to put off going back to school and concentrate all of my efforts into getting my music going again. I fired up my old Mac, which I hadn't used for a while because it had the old Mac OS 9 software and the older Mac chipsets since the Digi001 system wouldn't run on newer models. Then, as if pulling the sword from the stone, the power supply failed. I tossed the sword into the water and the "Lady of the Lake" brought the sword back to me in the form of a whole new recording studio built from the ground up.

I was going to call the 2nd album 12 Inch Pianist but the album cover design (still a WIP, and not what you see on the website) was very complicated so I switched it to my alternative idea which was to parody the Kid Rock album History of Rock and the song "American Bad Ass". Any similarities to another artist you find in my music, either seriously or in jest, I do because I, myself, am a fan. When the Friar's Club "roasts" someone, they only "roast" the ones they love. That, and I wanted to do it while Kid Rock was still in the limelight, so to speak. And once again, I don't know how many songs I have in me.

After copyrighting American Fat Ass I am now in the process of recording both albums as well as writing new songs whenever the muse strikes me. A wise man once said "An act of inspiration will always turn out better than an act of will". Like an artist painting or a poet writing, I believe that cranking out songs, books, and works of art under a timeline and for profit ruin the point and turn the work itself into a steaming pile of feculence. That's why the follow up works to successful albums are usually terrible. Very few bands have been able to bear the "Wrath of the Industry" to force songs out and be successful at it. Usually they end up bombing and banking on their older stuff to be able to do comeback tours 15 years later. Most good artists lose site of the natural process of songwriting and almost always wind up regretting the decisions they made because they were blinded by the fame an fortune. Grace Slick once said "you're so busy getting from A to Z that you forget there are 24 letters in between."

Out of all the fans I've talked to, all the CD inserts I've read, and all the video and TV specials I've watched, no one has ever pointed out what seems to me to be the biggest fallacy of the "The Industry", and that is this; if these producers, managers, reps, and executives know so much about music then why aren't THEY the ones writing the songs. With software and the internet at my disposal, I think I'll let the fans decide for themselves. Hey, don't get me wrong I would love to get signed, and I'm all about money as is every other human being, but not at the expense of the song. So if you've read this far and are thinking of signing me, know this;

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion."---Walt Whitman

Make sense? Good.

Any questions?