From a young age, songwriting has been a fascination of mine. When I was a child, my father would play guitar and sing country songs that he wrote. As I grew up in the 90s it was only natural that I would become a fan of grunge and punk music. Discovering Nirvana was a big turning point for me and began my lifelong love for songwriting. I learned every song they had and not only learned the chords but also studied the song structures and spent most of the time trying to understand how a proper song was constructed in an emotionally driven way. That obsession continued as I grew older and started listening to different genres like pop punk, death metal, etc.

In my early 20’s I set out to take the plunge into the music career I had been practicing and educating myself on my whole life and started a band. We would eventually call it A Day To Remember.

This was the first time I experimented with merging genres. Admittedly it was a compromise with the half of the band that wanted to be a hardcore band. So we started including breakdowns into pop punk songs which was a bit crude sounding at the time. But the more songs I wrote like that, the better they became.

Eventually, everything just clicked - and I realized that it could be done with other genres as well. This is something that I still use and incorporate today in almost every project I work on. I pride myself on taking influences from music that on the surface, wouldn’t seem to work together - but finding interesting ways of making it work.

I love the endless creativity in the idea that there are no genres - only different flavors that can be combined to create the perfect dish.