Heal - "The Weight Loss and First Album"

RELEASE DATE - SEPT 2015

Ah yes, the one that essentially started it all for me. How did I get to this?

I remember going into the end of 2014 and after my last band The Dalliance broke up due to Darrell moving away I was kind of in a bad place with a lot of things in my life.

I remember saying to myself “well, if this doesn’t pan out, I think I’m going to just do my own thing and see what happens” but the problem was, creatively I was letting my demons take hold of me more and more and I was essentially being lazy on all fronts.

My drinking was getting out of control at this point, along with my eating and overall health, and to be honest, when you are in a band environment where you have one guy who is churning out ideas like crazy and really good ones too, I was content at the time just being “the bass player dude” going along with the flow.

We had our own rehearsal space close by my house and always had a full fridge of beers, so I would find myself just plugging in, pounding drinks and just playing. Darrell, Barry and I always had great chemistry both as friends and musicians, so I was having fun at the time and honestly didn’t care.

The band prior The Brady Bastards, now that project I was the main songwriter so it was actually nice to just step back and just concentrate on being a bass player in a band for once. The guys would push me to write more and I would here and there, but I really didn’t want to. I was content on concentrating more on my bass playing and my “lifestyle” back then.

But once The Dalliance was no more, I found myself rotting from the inside.

By the end of 2014, I had ballooned up to over 300 lbs, the heaviest I have EVER been in my life. I was drinking as much as I could, my wife at the time got sober and I resented her for that, which hiked my “sneaky drinking” even more and didn’t help with our marriage at all. It got to the point where I was having trouble even walking and felt sick all the time.

Cut to December going to a family wedding, my “fat suit” barely fit, I was hammered for 2 days straight to the point of embarassment (at least at the rehearsal dinner, that was always my thing, go hard there, then nurse during the wedding to not make a complete fool of yourself). I went by myself so Sunday afternoon I’m driving home, hungover as hell, eating some big ass sandwich and decided to listen to Barry’s new podcast, which at this time Barry was a huge inspiration he had gotten sober a few years prior and was doing this pod about his new healthy lifestyle and here I am fighting the urge to not puke from the bad food and alcohol sweats on this ride home.

It was at this point, I said to myself “I need to change something…”

So I decided to take some of the ideas I was working on quietly in my home studio (Aka my Ipad), build a website on here and all I put on it was this heart, which was a pic I took of a clay heart that Zoey made as a necklace and it just said “HEAL…coming in 2015”

I also decided in order to make myself accountable, to blog my journey of trying to lose weight and show my progress while creating the album. Musically I honestly had NO idea what I was really doing at the time I barely played guitar, let along LEAD guitar and had little to no recording equipment but I figured “Let’s see what happens”. I even bought a midi keyboard so I could write on there, but I had NO idea how to even plug it in!

Although I always felt mediocre on everything besides bass, I knew through writing for the Brady Bastards, I could write catchy songs on my own.

My dear friend Darrell, who although was now in Cleveland was excited for the news and said he would engineer and produce the album for me as well as play drums on it, which was perfect! I would send him what I had and over the months he would send back his mixes and parts, which were sounding really, really good!

I even made the trip to his home in March where I recorded some vocals and some other missing parts for a few days, then as I wrote more I booked a day in a studio to record whatever vocal ideas I had left and sent to Darrell.

Even my boy Barry recorded the solo for “I wish I had U Forever” at his house on my IPad before we podcasted. That was a song that was special for me because Zoey and I wrote that together! She wrote the lyrics and the melody and I wrote the music on her little pink Fender. She was only 8 at the time too. Cut to now, she’s in college to be a music teacher.

Looking back at it as a whole, it’s still the best sounding album I’ve released but I was still a “mish mosh” of songs I struggled to put together to make a full length album, but that’s OK. I’m still super proud of this album and what I was able to accomplish. I even released it on cassette of all things!

Some songs like “Clear” were left over from the next Dalliance album we were working on that I came up with. “Get Back to Love” was an old Dalliance song too from our first demo I re-recorded. Hell, there were songs like “The Terrible” and “These Three Phases” I literally wrote lyrics on the spot on my phone and just sang while reading them off said phone in the studio hoping it would work….which by some miracle they did.

Musically, I wanted the album to be different than the punk rock, heavy sounding stuff I always did in the past. I wanted it to sound BIG and more dare I say, positive and hopeful.

That’s why I got heavy on the keyboard/piano sound and even strings. People who knew me always pegged me as the metal/hardcore/punk dude and I wanted to stretch my legs showing that I actually could sing, write some pretty personal lyrics and play other instruments besides the bass. I knew too with Darrell producing it, I would be able to get that big, professional sound.

In the back of my mind, when writing it I wanted to release something that like my father (who was also a major, major influence for me musically) would be like “wow, I like these songs!” He was more of an Elton John, Neil Young, Billy Joel, classic rock fan so although I DO NOT have those chops, I was trying to channel that style, but with a little more “piss and vinegar” to it which is more me.

The main thing though was that not only was I getting back to writing music again, I was also really focused on getting “healthier” and started losing a ton of weight! My goal at the end of 2015 was to lose 100lbs and I got close. I started eating better, doing Yoga a few days a week and by the end I dropped down to about 225lbs! I looked and felt a lot better and after the album was released I was excited to get back on stage, put a band together and play some of these tunes live. I promised myself I would NOT perform again unless I was able to do so without being a fat drunken mess.

I was able to recruit a few new musicians on this site Bandmix (which I dubbed, the Tinder of musicians) like Victor and Helene and even got my old dear friend Pete and we started to get out there and I was excited about the future finally!

But as always, although I was “Healing” I was still FAR from it and things were about to get interesting…