This is a milestone year for me…for a few different reasons.
Come July, it’ll mark 10 years of me living in Los Angeles…a city I had never intended to stay in at first. It was supposed to be San Diego. Then it was almost going to be Chicago. Then I fell in love with Toronto. Then I landed in LA, on my friends couch, and things just kind of happened.
I had tried this back in 2011. It was supposed to be a one-way ticket but plane tickets were cheap back then. $200 round trip got me to LA. In my first week hanging with a professor friend of mine – I was offered a car, a place to stay, and a job. The job turned into an unpaid internship. The car did not happen. I got kicked out of said place. So I moved down to San Diego. And even then, I said that I would stick it out unless I found a job, a place to stay, and a purpose to move back home. That happened all in one day. The purpose – for me to actually make an album of my songs. To showcase my abilities as a songwriter, an artist, a producer, and a performer.
I DID make an album under the name ‘Life On The Horizon’ – that turned into a band where we played a few shows, got on the radio once, and wrote some more songs.
By 2015, the band was no more, some family members, including my grandmother, moved out of their forever homes to new places. My mother and father were dissociating in their daily lives. I was lost in my personal life and it was getting harder to pull myself out. The hospitality industry wasn’t a place I wanted to stay. I was wanderlust.
I got asked to play a few shows with my friend’s punk band. That was life changing. I found myself in a cover band with my buddy Vince. That was an incredible experience. I was producing local artists’ albums. But eventually I made the decision to move to the west coast. I owe my friend Jo Stones pretty much everything for helping me cram my things in his car and moving out west. We had an incredible experience on the road playing show after show – the ‘ArGii + Stones’ tour. I dropped my stuff off in San Diego at the time and we continued playing shows. We played to a listening room full of about 60 people in Colorado. By the time we got back home to Philly – we played to about 2 people on the street outside of a clothing store. The neighbors were upset with us.
I flew back to LA a week later and crashed on my friend’s couch and the rest is…well life. It felt like a black cloud had been lifted off of me when I arrived and a year later I met my partner. It would be another 9 years before I played a show again with a new band.
Let’s go back to 2015. During all of life’s twists and turns I decided to go into the studio with a bunch of newly written material post-band-breakup. I was going through depression, grief, emotional chaos – being strung along in some ways, being cut off in others, and an aggressive shift in family life. Here at Silvertone Studios in Ardmore PA with my friend Valerie Vuolo, I tracked songs live with an acoustic guitar done in one or two takes. A few have so far found their way to official releases:
“Strung Out”
“This House Is Falling Down”
“Pennsylvania”
The first goal was to be as vulnerable as possible. The second was to showcase these songs as a songwriter. Life On The Horizon scratched an itch that was to record something professional as a rock band. I did that and it was awesome. With this new collection of songs, I wanted to show the world that I could write.
Once 2016 hit, I took what I thought were the 10-12 best songs, put them on a CD, and brought them on tour with me. Anyone who came out to the ArGii + Stones shows had the chance to get them. I was never satisfied with the mix or the track list so I shelved the release after that tour but I did work on the mix and track list again while out in Los Angeles, finishing things in 2022.
So 10 years in the making, you’ll finally get to hear this heartfelt collection of 10 songs that really kept me going as a musician even while in California. It’s a cohesive theme of love, heartbreak, and change.
A complete list of songs recorded during the Silvertone sessions:
XO / Catch Me If You Can
Get Well Soon
So In Love With You
Faith
It’s All The Same
Stars on pavement
New York Song
Good Morning November
Like A “Proud” American
Cut-Off
The Man With The Yellow Hat
Cherry Street
Strung Out
This House Is Falling Down
Pennsylvania
Miss What I Thought You Were
Withdrawal
Temporary Highs
Sometime
Left A Mark
Dark Turn
The Way Out
Good Times Are Coming (To An End)
+ 44
German Shepherd