My Life Since Winning the First Tracks Competition

Friends, Fans, and Bitter Enemies,

It's hard to believe that it's been more than 6 months since the Gather First Tracks Contest ended, and soon my EP will actually be released into the world. Before that happens, and because I'm hoping to convince as many of you as possible to shell out four bucks for my record, play it for your friends, and generally parade it around like a particularly attractive newborn baby, I'd like to tell you all a little more about myself.

I've been playing music since I was 7 years old. It all began with classical piano. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—all the big B's. When I was about 14, I moved on to jazz and blues (because nobody knows the blues better than a14-year-old, white suburbanite male). I picked up the guitar, then the mandolin. I started writing songs in college. There may be an ill-advised rap album extant. I fell in love with piano rock and started breaking my first few pianos. My passionate love of American musical theater need not be explored in detail here; suffice to say that, at some point in my life, I have appeared onstage, in front of hundreds of people who paid more than $25 to be there, as a kangaroo.

I discovered the Gather First Tracks Contest through the Gather First Chapters Contest, which I had also entered, fiction writing being my more clandestine artistic pursuit. I've written five novels, two of which were picked up by agents, but none have sold. Some of my stuff has appeared in Dave Eggers' lit mag McSweeney's, so you're welcome to Google me and check it out. Just don't search for my name and "A Whole New World from Disney's Aladdin." Seriously. Don't do it. Please.

Despite having been eliminated in the very first round of the First Chapters Contest, I performed CPR on my ego (it was dead for a full five minutes) and entered the First Tracks Contest. Because I do a bi-monthly webcast of songs and stories, I had a huge backlog of videos to choose from. I picked two that had been featured on YouTube, and entered them in the first two rounds of the Gather contest. What followed was a pretty amazing few months. I made it to the final round of First Tracks, met some other great musicians in New York, performed in front of Decca bigwigs (not to mention Paula Cole!), and managed to win the contest. I also saw Lindsay Lohan at a café. She was pretty in person. Very natural. Good skin. Nice shoes. I digress.

Since then, I've been hard at work. Decca put me in touch with producer Vince Pizzinga, who worked on a lot of Delta Goodrem's songs back in her Australia days. Together, Vince and I chose four songs for the EP, three of my originals and one cover. We recorded at a fantastic studio in Los Angeles, and brought in a string quartet, horns, a drummer, and a double-bass player. Once the songs were recorded, it was off to the mastering studio, where master masterer Drew Lavyne worked tirelessly for another few days turning dials and pushing buttons, all to make my staticky guitars, screechy violins, and stretched vocals sound amazing. Mastering is a truly impressive thing to watch happen; it's like aural chemistry.

And now, the EP is finally here. Though I'll be working as hard as possible as self-promoter extraordinaire in the coming weeks, what happens now is really up to the iTunes marketplace, and all of you. As much as possible, I need the Gather community to rally around this project. The word from Decca is that, should sales be good, the EP deal could turn into a full record deal. If I can make that happen, the sky's the limit.

So I plan to be very much in contact here on the site. I wouldn't have won the contest without you, and now I'm asking for your help again. I look forward to getting to know you even better in the coming months.

Thanks for everything you've done for me and my music.

Sincerely,

Tommy

P.S. Old versions of all 4 songs are posted here on Gather, so feel free to look for them: Drunk, Elodie, Room In Your Heart, and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. And believe me,
the newly recorded versions are WAY better! They've been mastered, for God's sake!