Steamboats

Catch up with Nick Throop of New York-based Americana group, Steamboats, and be sure to listen to and get your copy of their recent sophomore release, Chosen Peace.

What brought you all together?

Nick Throop: Me and Jon were high school friends. We went to high school in Newton, which is right outside of Boston, and pretty much since freshman year we've been playing in some amalgam of a band together. So, we played in high school and we went to college and found ourselves rooming together in New York, still playing music, and Mario, the third member of the band, went to Purchase, which is also where Jon went to college. Jon recommended he was a great player and, I think, around the Fall of 2011, we all got together and started playing folk traditional songs and I had a couple originals, Mario had a couple originals, and from there it kind of steamrolled [laughs] no pun intended.

Where does your name, Steamboats, come from?

You know, it's tricky [laughs]. It was one of those things where we were just sick of calling our project by each others names and I just suggested, 'hey, why don't we call it this?', and none of us feel strongly against it or for it, so that means it probably can stand the test of time. Me and Jon have been in so many different bands and we've come to acknowledge that if you initially like a band name, chances are, a month from now, you're going to hate that band name, so we picked a name that we were like, 'this is fine; I don't feel strongly about it, for it, or against it,' and, from there, it just became something where the music and the band name, they seemed to fit together pretty well. It's very nondescript, but it also harkens to what we do with our folk band and steamboats are this old-timey, not used form of transportation anymore which is similar to folk music, in general, which we're trying to revive in our own way.

You had your own originals and I read you took your time making sure your voices could harmonize well, so how does that creative process work in your group?

Yeah, there was a lot of development of harmonies and stuff like that. We had been singing in choirs - each one of us were in a choir in high school - so we're used to singing with a group, but we really leveled up when we really focused on the blend of each one of our distinctive voices; like, how Mario says a certain vowel versus how I say it and how Jon says a certain consonant versus how Mario says it, that kind of thing. We just blended them all together to see if we could create this unified voice that is Steamboats [laughs].

Which musicians have you been influenced?

My parents pretty much fed me Beatles from the womb, so my mom was a musician, my dad was a musician, so they recognize the importance of all that stuff and I appreciate that. In the new school of thought, I was really influenced by bands like Fleet Foxes, Band Of Horses - those indie bands that are doing a lot with vocal harmonies and blending - as well as the more bluegrassy numbers, like Nickel Creek and Crooked Still, they just shred on their mandolins and banjos and I'm a sucker for all that stuff. Using those, that new school folk and old school folk, seeing what we can combine and put together, see what comes out the other end.

What's in your playlist now?

[Laughs] Right now, this is interesting, I'm actually going through a hip-hop phase but, for the sake of Steamboats, my top albums that I always go back to are Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues, the Dawes album, North Hills; anytime someone plays anything by the band I tell them to turn it up, so that band is always there. Some of the more traditional ones, like James Taylor, I'm a sucker for his voice and his songwriting, all that stuff. Probably, as a guitarist and as classical guitarist, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham's guitar playing is just out of this world; I'm listening to Rumours once a month, at least.

How would you describe your sound to someone who had never heard Steamboats before?

I would say that we're a folk band at heart, but you can hear those influences of some of the more indie bands coming out of California and Seattle, like Fleet Foxes and Dawes but, at the end of the day, "Magnify" is a very simple, traditional folk song and, even in the lyrics, it's about a musician and he's on the road and he's tired of being on the road he's excited to be coming home to his own bed. I think, if I were to give three words, it would probably be a folky Americana band, with a heavy emphasis on musical arrangement; kind of guitar, mandolin, banjo interplay - there's complex arrangements throughout all of our songs.

So what was the inspiration behind "Magnify"?

Steamboats was coming along as a band and we were touring more and more and that was my first introduction to touring regularly. I'd been playing gigs here and there but doing four day runs and every night you're in a different city and then, come Sunday, you see the lights of New York City and you're like, 'oh great, I'm finally home and I'm going to sleep in Brooklyn tonight, that's great'. Yeah, that was my inspiration for "Magnify".

That's off your new album, could you tell us more about Chosen Peace?

Chosen Peace is definitely a level up from the EP. The EP we recorded, that was in our first year and a half of playing together and we were like, 'we just need it as a product so we can give it to venues and stuff like that and this is going to be just a simple, here's what we sound like, these are our four songs and if you like us, you should book us'. The album, Chosen Peace, was a little bit more premeditated. A friend of mine from college who is an engineer, he works at Electric Wilburland Studios, which is where we recorded the album, up in Ithaca, New York, and he has worked with a number of different bands very similar to our style and he was just very integral in creating an overall sound for the album. Each song has their own distinguishing qualities but, as an album, our engineer was really pivotal in making it, I don't want to say conceptual, but these songs flow into one another and there's one thing that you can find in every song that is similar. And, in those couple years that we played together, our songwriting and our playing and our blending, singing-wise, has doubled, if not tripled, in quality. So, it was really a level up for us, we're really proud of what we did with it and it surpassed all of our expectations in terms of the final product. These songs were good on their own, but then we put them down on the album and we had all these ideas in the studio; it was a fun experimental path and we're really proud of Chosen Peace.

What do you hope your listeners will take away from your music?

I want our listeners to put on this album - they just want to check it out because they're a friend of mine or something - and they're listening to it, doing whatever they're doing, and they stop and they're like, 'whoa, wait, what was that song? I need to go back and listen to it again'. For me, personally, the first time I hear an album it usually doesn't stick with me, it's usually the second or third listen where I'm really like, 'wow, this album is really good'. I want that for Steamboats, I want people to listen to us and be like, 'wow, that was really good,' and then, the second time they listen to it, be like, 'wow, this is like really good,' and then the third time they listen to it, they're like, 'I need to go see them live,' that kind of thing. Kind of an evolution of their appreciation for Steamboats.

Is there anything you'd like to add?

Just that we're excited to tour. We've been mostly touring the Northeast, but we're trying to expand outward; we're going to LA this weekend just to feel out the scene and see if they would be amenable to any shows that we would want to put on. But if there's anyone out there that wants to check out Steamboats in their local arena, we'll be in Manhattan playing shows for the foreseeable future.

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Sasha McVeigh

Look for British country singer-songwriter Sasha McVeigh on tour throughout 2016 in the UK, Europe, Canada, and the US and listen to her debut album I Stand Alone, out now.

What got you interested in music?

Sasha McVeigh: I've always had music, growing up, in the house. Both of my parents really loved listening to music; neither of them play any instruments and neither of them sing [laughs] but they really, really love music. My dad was a big country music fan so he always had his country cassette tapes and LPs and stuff playing and my mum loved Motown and The Rolling Stones and so I very much grew up with a lot of different musical influences in the house and then, just as I got older, I started learning different instruments and I would sing all the time and it just really grew from there. 

Do you remember the first song you wrote?

The first song that I wrote? That was a song called "Because I Love Him" [laughs] and it was originally inspired by my cat, which kind of sounds weird, but then I thought, 'well, I can't really write a song about a cat,' so I pretended that it was about a boy, but in reality, the actual secret is, it was about my cat [laughs].

You mentioned a few artists already, but which other artists or bands would you say you've been influenced by?

Well, I've always been a huge Elvis Presley fan, since I was about seven, and that era of music, like the rockabilly stuff and music from the '50s and '60s. That must have had an impact on me, musically; I can hear that vibe going on in my songs. Then, as I said, my dad used to listen to Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton and all the older stuff but, when I really re-discovered the genre, when I was about 12/13 - which is when I started writing songs - I listened to people like Zac Brown Band and Taylor Swift and just stuff like that. Lots of different things really, but those artists in particular. People like John Denver, I can really, really hear the influence in the way that I write songs and how I tell a story. 

Is there any artist or song that you're hooked on right now?

Yes, I am obsessed with Adele's new song, "When We Were Young" [laughs]. I think I've played it 127 times already on iTunes, it's quite bad [laughs].

Which words would you use to describe your own sound?

Ooh, that's always a tough one! One of the words I would use is definitely honest, because all of my songs are written from real life and true life experiences. Often when I'm on stage and the fans want to know what the song was about, I'll tell the story and you can literally hear that exact story coming across in the song, 'cause I just think that's the best way to be relatable to people; that's the way it happened and, often, that's the way it happens for somebody else and, I think, when you're that honest and direct with people, they're definitely going to respond better. So, honest is definitely one of the words I would use. Oh, I don't really know, it's so hard. Probably powerful; a lot of people have said that my songs are very powerful and unique and kind of quirky at the same time, because I do tend to throw some curveballs in there that people don't expect from me.

So, honest, powerful, quirky, and unique.

What was the inspiration behind your single, "Someone To Break My Heart"?

That's kind of a funny story. It's weird that it ended up being the single because when I actually wrote that song I thought it was terrible, I thought it was a really bad song [laughs]. My producer got ahold of it and listened to it and said, 'what are you talking about? You're being crazy, it's a great song, we have to put that on the album,' and then it ended up being the single. I was writing a song which actually also ended up on my album, a song called "You Only Live Once" with a guy called AJ Masters and we were just talking about songwriting and how sometimes it can be difficult to find inspiration for songs and he just made a joke that songwriters want someone to come along and break their heart just so that they can write a decent song [laughs]. I wrote that little quip down in my songbook because I just thought that was so true and when I went back to the hotel I just started thinking on that idea. I didn't really want to center it just on songwriters, because that would have been too much of a narrow field of people to base it on, so I took it one step further and thought, in life, you have to be willing to go out there and risk getting your heart broken if you're ever going to find the person you're supposed to be with. I certainly think that's definitely something I can relate to because, at the time, I didn't really want to date anybody because the last break-up I'd had had been really bad. You know, you kind of just become almost a hermit on the dating scene, so to speak, because you just don't want to deal with that drama [laughs]. I wrote that song and I thought it was a message to myself to get back out there and a message to other people that you can't give up.

Could you tell us more about that album, I Stand Alone?

It's definitely a snapshot of my life so far. Some of the songs go back a really long way. The title track, "I Stand Alone", is actually one that I wrote when I was fourteen because I was being bullied at high school and that was the only way I could vent how I was feeling and everything. I've never really been one to conform to what other people want me to do, I've always very much been the kind of person that just wants to be myself, no matter what people think, and that song was kind of me just saying, 'look, I don't care what you say about me, I'm just going to be me 'cause that's the only person that I can be,' and that became a really big theme for the album once we decided that that track was going to be on there. That became almost a theme for the whole record and I just started thinking, I don't want to make a record that the industry is going to be happy with, I don't want to make one that's going to get great reviews - that's all well and good - but I really want to make a record that I'm going to be proud of and that my fans are going to enjoy because, at the end of the day, that's the most important thing. So that was really cool, that realization really early on. It's definitely a journey. You'll have the up moments of "Mr Brown Eyes" and having a crush on a guy that you see from afar and run into again out of the blue, then you've got songs like "Stupid Girl", which is a song that I wrote when you always knew the relationship was going to end badly but you tried to make yourself believe that wasn't going to happen, then there's a song called "Hot Mess" on there which is just about going out and doing stuff unexpected and just hanging out with your best friends and stuff like that, so it's definitely a journey.

You're heading out on tour with American Young and Loveless Effect, do you have a favorite track to perform live?

Ooh, that's a tough one. Well, actually, what's going to be exciting about this tour is that I'm going to be debuting some other songs that I've been writing recently that aren't on the album, so that's going to be kind of fun but, definitely, "Hot Mess" is a great one to perform live because it's just so high energy and I know my drummer loves doing that one because he gets to go crazy on the drums [laughs]. I also love doing ones like "You Only Live Once" because it's just such a poignant song and I often do that one stripped back and acoustic, which is really how I started this whole thing, it was just me and my guitar, so it's really cool to get up there and do stuff like that, too.

I have to tell you, when I asked Loveless Effect that same question the first two songs they named were yours.

[Laughs] Are you serious? That's so cool! I love those guys so much, they are so talented it's unbelievable. What's so great is, when we're on tour together, we're practically all staying in the same hotel room together, we're just the best of friends, and they just practice and they play all the time. What's really cool is, before actually getting with a band, I just thought it was me that would wake up at weird hours in the night with an idea for a song but, when you get into a situation where you are around musicians all the time, you see that it's just something that we all do [laughs] and that's what'll happen. We'll all be asleep and then one minute Seth will wake up and be like, 'oh my god, I've got an idea,' and then he will have to write it down and then everyone will go back to sleep and, an hour later, Justin will be like, 'oh my god, I have an idea,' and it's like, should we just not bother sleeping? Let's just write, there's just no point [laughs].

What do you hope your listeners are able to take away from your music when they hear it?

Well, hopefully they'll be able to relate to the songs. That's always my biggest hope, when people listen to it, is that if they're going through anything or they need some advice or they just need to know that there's somebody else out there that's going through the same thing as them, I just really hope if they listen to my songs that they can take a bit of hope away from it. That's certainly what I always loved about listening to music, is that when anything went wrong or even if something really awesome was happening, it was great to be able to find a song, and that's especially what I love about country music, is you can find a song that relates to any situation that you're going through and I think that's the power of music. I certainly hope that's something that they can take from my stuff. That's the dream anyway [laughs].

Is there anything you'd like to add?

Apart from the UK and Europe tour that I'm going on that I'm doing in March and April with American Young and Loveless Effect, I'm also off to the US and Canada in the Summer. I'm doing a big tour over there. I'm going to be playing on the main stage at about 10 to 15 music festivals which is going to be insane! I just posted about one of them the other day and it's kind of bizarre when I'm writing my name alongside people like Jake Owen and Sam Hunt; that's definitely a pinch me moment [laughs].

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American Young

Catch up with American Young's Kristy Osmunson and Jon Stone and look for the Nashville based country duo's forthcoming album to be released March 11th.

How did you come up with your name American Young and what does it mean to you?

Jon: We were writing one day and Kristy actually had a song idea called "Young America" that she'd written and we thought American Young would be an awesome name for a band and it really describes, I think, where we are and where we come from and growing up in this country and the influences that it's had on us. It was just the perfect name for us because it means so many things to us, as far as, we're not exactly spring chickens, but we can really relate to a lot of different people of different ages and stuff and I like to think that American Young, there's an almost ageless effect to that music, it's more of a timeless thing. 

Kristy: Yeah, I think American Young is very encompassing. We're idealistic people and we like to sing the ideas of what we want to be, where we want to go, and I think that that's what the American dream is. I was born in Canada and Jon's American and we both live in Nashville, Tennessee and we're just chasing it all the time. I think that's what American Young is; you can do whatever you want to do and you can be who you wanna be.

What brought you two together?

Kristy: Jon has a number one song that he wrote called "A Woman Like You" for Lee Brice and it was his number 1 party and I was on the co-write and now he can't get rid of me. I'm persistent.

Which musicians have you been influenced by?

Jon: I think we are connoisseurs of music from all different ranges. I grew up on classical music, as well as Kristy did, and I got into rock music and country music early in my life, everybody from Metallica to Black Sabbath to Led Zeppelin to The Beatles and blah, blah, blah - it's just the range. I can't tell you that there's a type of music I don't like. I love opera. I just love all genres.

Kristy: I'm pretty much in the same boat. I'm obsessed with '90s country though. I'm such a Winona fan and I absolutely love Garth Brooks, so much. I play the fiddle so I feel like that's when I really started feeling music, was when I started listening to '90s country and I've never been the same since.

You're both musicians and songwriters, so how does the creative process work between you two when you are working on new music?

Jon: We live in a town where there are the most amazing songwriters - there's no community of songwriters in the entire world like the one in Nashville - so we write songs and play ourselves, but we also are absolutely open to recording other songs that we hear; if somebody writes a song that fits us, then we would be foolish not to do it. Every artist in the history of time has always recorded outside of their own because it's just smart to do that, you can't write a song every day, but when it comes to writing together - we do write together for American Young stuff - we just kind of know what it is now, so it's easier to write it.

You mentioned the ageless factor earlier, what other words would you use to define your sound?

Jon: Good [laughs].

Kristy: [Laughs] We are - 

Jon: I would say romantic.

Kristy: Yes, very romantic.

Jon: I think that our music's definitely dynamic.

Kristy: It has a lot of depth of conversation. There's a lot of conversation, a lot of perspective, a lot of depth to it. We have a lot of layers to this whole record and we're really proud of it. It's coming out March 11th and we put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into the making of this project, so we're just incredibly excited to watch how it connects with people.

How would you sum up that forthcoming record in one sentence?

Jon: I would say the unadulterated story of American Young [laughs].

"Love Is War" is an outside cut, could you tell us more about the song and why you choose to record it?

Kristy: So, Billy Montana, the guy who wrote that song, is a soulmate co-writer to both me and Jon. He's written most of our record with us and I had actually heard that in a meeting with some friends of mine, they were playing some songs, and, you know, [laughs] I don't think I've ever honestly done that. We were looking to develop and see what this band was about but, when you've first started, you're playing live shows to empty rooms and you're hunting around and we really wanted to find the purpose in what American Young was and it became this relational conversation and "Love Is War", I felt was a song so far ahead of its time. I mean, I just feel like it's an element of real in this world of 3 minute alcohol advertisements which, essentially, to me, is what country music has gotten into - which is fine, it's so much fun, but we've been writing songs with no substance - and I heard that song and I was like, 'man, there's substance to it, it's so powerful'. [Laughs] Real love ain't always easy and that is not always hung on the wall.

You're heading out on tour with Sasha McVeigh and Loveless Effect, do you have a favorite song to perform live?

Kristy: Yes, I like "Point Of View". I really love that song, I love playing it live. You can see how people, everywhere, have connected with that and it's so much fun.

Jon: I would say I really like "Point Of View"; I really like playing "Party In The Dark"; I like "American Dream", a lot. There's a lot of songs I like. I just like playing all of them.

What do you want your listeners and fans to be able to take away from your music?

Kristy: I would say, hopefully, it is a heart opener and it gives you a good glimpse into your soul as a human being and, also, kind of taking your relationships and hopefully celebrating the next level. I just hope that one gets an insight to their own soul.

Is there anything you'd like to add?

Kristy: We are excited to see everyone and meet everyone at a live show.

Jon: Yeah, come say hi to us.

Kristy: Yes, come listen to live music. And, eat local, think global. We love you all. Good night!

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The Tin Man

Look for Atlanta based folk rock artist, The Tin Man (Marshall Seese), to release his forthcoming EP, Too Many Lines, in March and listen to the current single "Please Don't Let Me Go".

What got you interested in music and why choose to leave the corporate world for music?

Marshall Seese: Well, let's see, where to start. As far as what got me interested in music, I grew up in a semi-musical household, meaning my mom was a vocal major in college and always sang in church and made sure to get me involved in piano at a very young age. That led to church musicals and chorus in middle school and music's always been a part of my life and that just continued to mature into other instruments and, eventually, songwriting. As far as why I left the corporate world, it's one of those things where you reach the breaking point and, at first, it seems like it's so hard to leave and you're clinging to what's familiar and then you reach a point of just knowing it's not what you're supposed to be doing and, all of a sudden, it becomes almost impossible to continue doing what you're doing and, once it hits that point, you gotta pull the ripcord. 

Obviously there's a Wizard of Oz tie-in, but where does your moniker, The Tin Man, come from?

I've written songs and played music for a long time; it's always been my professional hobby, even when I was in the corporate world, but the songs were always lacking something and you can almost say they were lacking heart. I think I just wasn't connecting with my own music in a really powerful way; that didn't stop me from writing, didn't stop me from playing, but, eventually, in early 2014, I went through some corporate and romantic trials and tribulations that I think rocked me at a core deeper than I'd ever been rocked before and it started bringing up music unlike anything I'd written before. It was certainly darker, from a lyrical perspective, but it was some stuff that I was connecting with at a level I had honestly never connected my own music with before. I was so passionate about it and even my friends could see the difference, so when I started to want to play those songs out at the clubs I played and I didn't want to do it under my name, which is what I'd been performing under before, because it felt like this was something new and I wanted to reinvent myself a little bit, because I basically had reinvented myself, and I knew I wanted a moniker that wasn't just my name. It's also kind of very awkward when people ask you what band you're in and you have to tell them your name [laughs]. So, I was just trying to think of something that I felt represented the music and would give people a hint of what it might be.

I've always thought the greatest band name in the world would be 'The Lions' and it's mind-boggling to me that there's not a band out there called The Lions, but I think every musician respects the fact that, if you're going to call yourself The Lions, you better be the best damn rock band that's ever graced the face of the planet. So, I was thinking about the word 'lion' which led me down The Wizard Of Oz path and I was like, 'oh, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, Dorothy, and holy shit the Tin Man'. I was like, 'I embody the Tin Man'. I felt like I was on a quest for a new heart and I felt I found that in this new music.

Which artists or bands have you been influenced by?

Reaching deep into the archives, I grew up on The Beach Boys. A lot of my friends' parents had record collections they really envied, my parents did not have a record collection I really envied [laughs] but for some things in particular; Paul Simon and The Beach Boys, which they had a lot of and I looked to a lot growing up. So, melody and harmony have always rung true to me as something that I look for in all the music I listen to, so those are huge early influences. I then got really obsessed with R.E.M. through the majority of high school and owned all of their records up to a large point in time. More recent, John Mayer came out of Atlanta and so I knew about him - as did most folks here - well before he had any sort of notoriety and that definitely played a role. Today, if you listen to my Spotify playlist, you're going to hear a lot of folk, a lot of folk rock, a lot of ambient stuff. My tastes run the gamut, but it always kind of comes back to melody for me.

Is there an artist you're hooked on now?

Yeah, there's a few. I would say that the one I'm really into now is RHODES, from the UK, and he just released his first LP called Wishes a few months back, but it's really just emotionally powerful stuff.

Which words would you use to describe your own sound?

It's almost like anthemic folk [laughs]. I think most people, when they think of folk, they think Bob Dylan or acoustic guitar, singer-songwriter, folk festivals, and my stuff is driven primarily by hollow body electric guitar however, I think it still holds true to the folk roots and the emotions and the stories that come out in the lyrics, but the production gives it this epic, anthemic quality to it.

What was the inspiration behind your single, "Please Don't Let Me Go"?

So, when I went through the business and romantic trauma, I went to Northern Spain and I hiked the Camino de Santiago for a couple weeks, which was an amazing life-shifting, perspective-shifting experience. I brought my backpack guitar with me thinking I was just going to be a songwriting machine for two weeks and, in reality, I only ended up writing like one and a half songs and "Please Don't Let Me Go" was one of them. I remember it was kind of in the middle of the trip and it was one of those beautiful cities I'd been to called O Cebreiro, the highest point on the Camino - you can see, literally, for many, many, many miles and it's a 360 degree view - and I was sitting on top of this mountaintop playing with these chords and I tuned my guitar into an alternate tuning I never really used to play with and just came up with the groove. A lot of times when I'm writing, when I have a musical groove like that, I'll just start singing gibberish and the reason I sing gibberish is because that's when my subconscious starts to speak and so "Please Don't Let Me Go" came out; I just started singing it and when I examined that it was very clear that that was my heart kind of talking to the girl who had broken up with me. We were still kind of talking, we were still in touch, and it felt like there was a chance that it wouldn't completely end and it was a plea to her to not let me go because I felt her doing that; I could feel it emotionally, even though I was in another country I could feel her really letting me go. So that's what inspired the song.

That's off your forthcoming EP, Too Many Lines, could you tell us more about that?

Yeah, so I'm not one of those artists where every song sounds the same, if anything I battle the exact opposite problem [laughs] where every song sounds different and I think Billy Hume, the producer, did a really phenomenal job of taking five songs that could sound wildly different and really kind of create these beautiful, intertwining elements, either sonically or tied in by my voice and the harmonies that really makes it work as a cohesive EP, despite the fact that each song really has its own personality. Each song is going to stand out for different reasons, but it will all be tied together by my guitar sound - which is a very particular tone that I've crafted over the last few years - my voice, the harmonies, and you'll hear a lot of strings on it, again with that anthemic, epic. You're going to be imagining some movie scenes when you listen to it [laughs].

Do you have a favorite track from that EP, one you're most excited for your fans to hear?

Ooh, I am really excited for people to hear "Already Gone", which will be the next single that we put out. It's interesting because I think it's one of the most relatable, I think it's a situation that every single person in the world has been in and, from an artistic perspective, I took a song that has its own pop catchiness to it and it just felt like it needed this intro; there's actually a one minute long instrumental introduction to the song that, on the album, will be one long track but, on iTunes, you will be able to purchase the single separately, too, just in case you want to cut to the chase. 

What do you hope your listeners are able to take away from your music?

I hope that they take away a sense of hope and a sense of acceptance for whatever pain or struggles they might be going through in their own lives. One of the things I learned when I was in Spain that changed my perspective is, I used to think that happiness was eliminating all the struggle and all the pain from my life and what I realized after 14 days of my feet never getting used to walking 13 miles a day, it was that the pain in life is a part of life, it never goes away and there's always going to be some type of pain there, but you can't let that distract you from the incredible beauty that we're surrounded by everyday. Hopefully people hear that in the music.

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