I’m a musician.

A drummer, composer, and songwriter, I feel that my music is meant to

express the unique relationship I have with the world and to put myself in conversation with the

many others who find their voice through music. I believe that, if you’re looking for it, art

resonates despite anything. I didn’t grow up in a musical family, or even an especially artistic

family. My father’s father would often play the trumpet, but he lived across the country so I’d

never heard a single note. My mother’s father was a painter and a cartoonist, but he died before I

ever had the chance to meet him. The closest influence I had in the arts was my older sister. Her

skill and passion for visual art inspired my first steps into expression. Learning from her and

through experimentation, I began to draw, doodle, and sketch. Still, I never exactly thought of

myself as an artist in the visual sense. Even now, there’s a distinction in how I engage with visual

art versus how my sister may engage with visual art, and I believe that to be a personal and

conscious decision. My sister creates art that is evocative and aesthetically interesting entirely

through paint or pencil, whereas I seldom draw entirely for its own sake. Any drawings I do

create are most likely made to enhance the art I create musically or through writing. For

example, I may use digital art and photoshop for a piece of album art, or sketch character designs

for a story idea I have.

I started to consciously and intentionally engage with music in the 6th grade when I

joined the school concert band. The four of us percussionists were only there to learn the drums

but we were started on mallet percussion to have a proper grasp of music notation for both pitch

and rhythm. If I think back, it was messing around with my friends and trying to play popular

songs on the bells that got me to start thinking closer about the music I was listening to.

Eventually, this led me to write my first small compositions on MuseScore. I wasn’t directly

aware of most of my influences when I started writing, but I’d say it was a combination of Joe
Hisaishi’s whimsical compositions for the Studio Ghibli movies, the popular emo and rock bands

my friends and I were listening to at the time, and soundtracks from video games I’d played.

Although I’m not sure of a particularly formative experience with music, I can easily point to a

band that I can say followed me through those formative years of my life, that being Radiohead.

Radiohead is a band known for their dramatic shift in sound after their third album, OK

Computer, from alt-rock to music that became much more experimental and genre-fluid. So,

because I’ve been a fan of the band since middle school, I can trace my life through what

Radiohead albums I gravitated to, from the angsty distortion of “Creep,” to the glitchy drums of

“Airbag,” and the moody falsetto of “Reckoner.” In general, I find myself inspired by new songs,

bands, and genres almost every day. Although I can see the benefits of knowing a particular

genre very well, I’ve always tended to go through phases in different genres, from indie to jazz to

certain genres of EDM, and applying aspects of each to my music. I hope that moving forward in

my time at Berklee, I can expand that stylistic range a lot further and meet new people with

different perspectives and relationships with music.