Autobiography (short & sweet)
Hi. My name is Jamie. I'm a musician -- keyboard player to be specific, though I do play a bunch of instruments. This is just a website that I decided to make as an experiment. My humble footprint in the vastness of cyberspace, if you will. Enjoy.
Autobiography (the long & boring version)
Hi again. So you really wanted to read the story of my life? The entire internet at your disposal and this is what you choose?
Well, I'll try to keep this specific to music, being that most likely this is why you came to my website. Also, I'm not an English major, and I'm writing this pretty quickly, and there is a lot to write so please bear with me. Here it goes:
I grew up in Hopewell, New Jersey, which is one town over from Princeton. Growing up, I was fortunate enough to be raised in a household where my father was a musician, so I always had plenty of instruments at my disposal. I learned how to play most of the instruments on my own with some coaching from my dad. The first room as you walked into our house was dubbed "The Studio". There was an old drum-set from the 60s, a beautiful upright Yamaha piano, an old 4-track reel to reel tape recorder, some keyboards and other musical miscellany. Needless to say, being immersed in this environment as a child had a profound impact on me.
I started out playing the trumpet in elementary school (an instrument which I stuck with throughout my college career, and can still play today). However, as the advent of the grunge revolution was underway, I decided to learn how to play rock music. I started off learning some Nirvana and Metallica songs on guitar, but eventually switched to drums, being that all of my friends were playing guitar and there were no drummers.
I started up my very first band in the 7th grade with me behind the drum set. The band was called "Vertigo". Pretty cool right? After a steep learning curve, and a year of practicing, we landed our first gig. I remember it quite vividly. It was the very end of 8th grade, right before going into high school. We got to play three songs in our middle school's auditorium in front of the whole school. It was my first taste of rockstar-dom; a rush to say the least.
I quit playing drums after freshman year of highschool, when I realized that one of my friends was excelling at drums much more rapidly than I, as well as starting to play with the kids in my circle of friends who I was currently playing with. Since I had access to keyboards, and knew how to play, I decided, as a survival instinct, to take up the keyboards, instead of getting phased out by the better drummer. I've stuck with the keys ever since.
By the time I was a senior in highschool, I was playing keyboards in two bands, a rock/jazz/jam band called "Esoteric Poppycock" which mostly played covers, and a really strange "hardcore techno" band with three keyboard players and a guitar player called "The Jerolds". "Esoteric Poppycock" ended up winning Battle of the Band our senior year, and it was off to college.
I ended up at the University of Delaware as a Computer Science major (with a minor in jazz just for fun). The thought of music, while it was in my blood, just never seemed plausible as a career. People would just tell me how much of a long-shot it is to make it in the music industry. They were right. But I eventually decided to confront this challenge. I knew that I didn't want to sit in an office everyday going through lines of code as a programmer (ironically as I'm doing right now making this website). I wanted to take a risk, and you only get to be young once, so that's what I decided to do.
Around my sophomore year of college is when I started playing with musicians around UD campus. We put together a solid line-up after about a year of playing around, and decided to call the band "Omnisoul". The band was making music which was a mixture of pop/rock with some electronic and progressive elements thrown in. Very quickly, we began to stand out and pick up buzz around campus as well as the tri-state area. We released an EP called "Climbing Ladders" independently and the next year, a full-length album called "Happy Outside". We recorded the whole album at a friend's house, save for one song which we did at Studio 4 in Conshohocken, PA with legendary producer/engineer Phil Nicolo called "Waiting (Save Your Life)".
The year after I graduated college is when things really started to pick up. 93.7 WSTW, which is the Top 40 station in Wilmington, Delaware actually added "Waiting (Save Your Life)" into rotation, where it stayed for months. Keep in mind, it's pretty unheard of for a local band to be added into the cut-throat playlist of a Top 40 station, so this was a major accomplishment for us. Not only did it make it to #1 on the station charts, beating out huge artists like Green Day, but we also shattered a station record for requests; a record that is still held today.
We started to make quite a name for ourselves in the area. Packing clubs in Delaware and Philly, and selling our self-produced album "Happy Outside" like hotcakes at the local record shop on campus, our band name ended up being mentioned in an issue of Rolling Stone magazine, and soon the record labels began asking questions. We were courted by several labels, did some showcases in NYC and had some meetings with the big wigs via limousine (naturally). After all the schmoozing was over, we ended up signing a record deal with an independent record label called Wind-up Records who were responsible for some pretty big bands like Evanescence, Creed, Seether and Finger Eleven.
Getting signed right after college was a dream come true. I got to quit my dayjob and move into a huge house which the label rented for the band to write our album in. After a couple months, the album was written and we moved up to NYC for another two months to record it at Avatar Studios with producer Gregg Wattenberg. The first song we recorded there was a brand new version of the single "Waiting (Save Your Life)", to be included on the Fantastic Four Soundtrack. It was pretty cool to be able to have a song on a major soundtrack only a couple months after the record deal was signed. On the other hand, we had no idea that we'd have to wait about another two years before the album was released and then we would eventually part ways with the label.
The two years that "Omnisoul" was signed to Wind-up Records was really quite a blur for me. There were times of extreme elation and feeling of success, followed by times of intense dissapointment, and many long months of waiting. It was a true rollercoaster ride, and while it was difficult, these trying experiences truely helped shape me into who I am today.
Another noteworthy accomplishment that we had during our stint with Wind-up Records other than getting a song onto The Fantastic Four Soundtrack was a placement on the wildly popular Madden 2007 videogame, which put our music in the homes of millions of kids. We also began receiving spins at sports stadiums all throughout the country. In addition to being featured on an ESPN NFL highlights reel, we got the biggest placement of our careers thusfar; The Superbowl. Our song "Not Giving Up" was played for about twenty seconds right before the halftime show. About a year later, they used "Not Giving Up" at a historic moment in the MLB; the first time instant replay was used to make a call.
We toured the USA and received radio spins across the world. We got to open for some huge bands like The All-American Rejects, Lifehouse, Collective Soul, and a bunch more. I landed an endorsement deal with Kurzweil Music Systems, an endorsement that I still have today. They were nice enough to keep me on board even after the band broke up.
During these two years, Wind-up Records was constantly changing our single, and pushing back the release date of our album. They finally deemed our album un-releasable until we had a stronger single. We had to go back to the drawing board and write a new single. On a positive note, we were flown out to LA to work with mega-producer Don Gilmore (Lincoln Park, Avril Lavigne), and recorded "No Tomorrow, Just Tonight". Soon after this, we were under a great deal of pressure from the record label to change our band name due to purported marketing issues. We fought against this tooth and nail, but when they were threatening to not release our album unless we did this, we caved and bit the bullet for the greater good. It was just a name after all, right? These people know what they're doing, right? Anyway, after months, we decided on "The Crash Motive" as a replacement to "Omnisoul".
Our first major-release as "The Crash Motive" was October 2007, and the album was called "Consequence". The label ended up changing the single at last minute from "No Tomorrow, Just Tonight" back to "Not Giving Up", completely changing the marketing plan, due to a TV placement on the show "Las Vegas". We flew back out to LA and did a music video for "Not Giving Up".
A mere two months after our album was released, our manager got a call from the president of Wind-up Records. The record wasn't selling well, and "Not Giving Up" wasn't 'testing well' (whatever that means), so they wanted to let us go. Gladly we accepted. We saw this as a great thing; a time to not be controlled by a label and to have full creative control over our product; furtherly, we could move things forward at our pace rather than having to get approval and wait days for phone calls and e-mails to be returned.
We ended up recording a 6 song EP called "Just Cause It Never Happened Don't Mean It Won't" in Delaware with the assistance of producer Ritchie Rubini and engineer Kevin Walsh and we even managed to get the legendary engineer Nick DiDia (Pearl Jam, STP, Incubus) to mix for us. Things were going pretty well, but I guess not well enough to keep the band together. The band broke up in December 2008, and did our last show as "The Crash Motive" at the Deer Park Tavern in Newark, DE, a venue where we played one of our first shows as "Omnisoul".
After The Crash Motive broke up, I started playing with Ian Walsh almost immediately. Within 2009, I have already played a ton of shows and have even done some national touring with Ian and his band. Also recorded keyboards on his new album 'Seeing Stars'. It's been a blast!
In addition to playing with Ian, I've been able to find time to work on some other projects. Currently, Josh Berger, and myself from The Crash Motive have been working on a new project which we hope to eventually transition into a real band. We're looking for a brand new sound; something that hasn't been done yet. It might not be super-marketable; you might not even like it, but our goal is to make music that we like, and we can only hope that other people like it too. We're very busy writing a brand new arsenal of material and recording demos. It's coming out really cool, and hope to be able to debut it for you soon.
I'm always open for work-for-hire situations and session work, pending my current commitments. If you need my help for a gig, or a recording, please contact me directly. Shoot me an e-mail and we'll figure something out.
My e-mail address is  so hit me up. Thanks for reading!
More about Jamie (can you handle any more?)
Some more random stuff about me. I have a wonderful family, and a wonderful girlfriend (who I've been with for 6 years, yikes!) I love good food, and you can find it almost anywhere if you look carefully. I also enjoy cooking when I have time. I grew up in the 80's so I'm a big fan of older videogames, though there's a lot of new stuff I like, particularly Guitar Hero. Completely obsessed with the TV show, LOST, and I'm dying to see the final season to finally know once and for all how this is all going to make sense. I'm fascinated with science, particularly cosmology and the quantum world. I'm a sucker for books by guys like Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku. As far as music, I love everything from electronic to jazz to metal, and anything in between. You name it. However, I'm not one of those people who says that they like 'everything', because I don't. In fact I think that the great majority of the music out there isn't good. Every genre has its garbage and its gems. You sometimes just have to look a little bit harder for the good stuff. Mainstream radio is NOT the place to look. I believe that every person is endowed with unique talents, and everyone has their part to play in impacting society in a positive manner. It's unfortunate that so many people choose to use their talents for their own selfish needs. My goal, that I strive to attain, is to use my music to try to make the world a better place. I'm a member of The Bahá'í Faith, which is an independent world religion with over five million believers world-wide. Bahá'ís believe in God, and believe that the world is one human family, and much, much more (beyond the scope of this bio). Check out www.bahai.org for more info. Again thanks for reading!
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