Artist Statement

I wrote my first poem on a mothers day card in the third grade. I think I fell in love with that process right then and there. I continued to write poetry, but just for fun, because although my parents made sure I was well educated in the arts as well as academically, it was always an unspoken fact that I would pursue a career that was more sensible and less of a risk. 

I went to college and got excellent grades, but could not pick a major, it felt like I wanted to do everything and nothing. In my second year of college, while being exposed to the world of hip hop via friends and new artists I liked, I took a look at my now extensive collection of poems and decided that I wanted to turn them into songs. I can't sing, so the only way I felt I could express myself was through rap. It was hard being suburban, white, ect. and trying to fit into a world I knew nothing about, so I went to a friend of a friend who was a local rapper and asked him to help me. After a few meetings he stopped answering my calls and a few weeks later put out a "diss song" about me and a friend of mine. It seemed silly but we recorded one too and went back and forth on Youtube for a while. After that it became all about proving him, and everyone else wrong. I wrote and practiced endlessly, and slowly, as I got better and better, it became less about proving people wrong and more about how much I loved it. But I still only did it for fun. I was still in school and decided I wanted to be a lawyer. 

At 21, I moved to the city from Long Island and reconnected with an old friend who was also part of the hip hop circuit. I was going to John Jay College and was one semester away from graduating, when I dropped out to pursue music full time. Something in me clicked, I knew I was meant to be an artist, not a lawyer. I recorded a mixtape, and decided it was time to shoot a video. I borrowed my Dads Nikon 90d, and my friend, who had never touched a camera shot a video for me which I though my other friend would edit. When she bailed on me I decided to mess around with final cut and see what I could do. That was it. I edited the video in 3 days and was completely in love. In the next year I recorded and edited about 15 videos for myself and my friends, but started to feel like I wanted to get away from music videos, and into film. At that point I came up with an idea to combine my love for music with my growing love for film. I was very inspired by Kanye West's "Dark Fantasy" since his songs were a new brand of hip hop and his concepts were similar to mine. I started to turn my general idea of doing something about the 7 deadly sins into a screenplay and eventually a short film/music video hybrid. I was and still am working on the film and music simultaneously, and I'm really not sure if I am a musician working on a film, or a film maker working on music. Either way, I finally feel like I have something worth giving up an easier, risk free way of life. But I don't think I ever really had a choice.