Music in one form or another has been in my life, all my life. From my Mom spinning everything from Country to Hard Rock to my brother bowing the walls with everything from The Bealtles to Wasted Youth.  I was surely raised on an eclectic array of music. I'd been writing songs for years before "Paper" was even a thought. I started playing drums in 1988. Playing along to my mom's Billy Squire and Foreigner records and my brothers Led Zeppelin and Rush records. I knew from the moment I watched "The Song Remains The Same" a live Led Zeppelin concert filmed at Madison Square Garden that playing music was my destiny. The funny thing is, before I even got a drum kit. My Mom saved her pennies to get me a keyboard. An affordable but boring substitute. We lived in an Apartment and you can imagine how Drums and Apartments don't mix. I use to set the keyboard on the DRUM setting and play "When The Levee Breaks" with my fingers. I was pretty desperate to play drums. I eventually got a drumset... Bless my Moms heart. We we're evicted from that apartment complex less than a year later. In between School (which was always on the back burner for me) and Skateboarding, I was always thinking about and/or playing my drums. In High School I met Klaus Ketelhohn, a guitar player and Rush Fanatic much like myself. We were truly "music geeks" at heart. Our band "Abstract" was a cover or tribute band that consisted of us learning note for note covers of songs like "La Villa Strangiato" an elaborate fusion fused rock instrumental by Rush and "Wrapped Around Your Finger" by The Police. I found in that experience what became another passion of mine... Singing. I've always had a high voice so naturally, I was chosen to sing Stings parts. We also got into other Rush obscurities like "Marathon" and I played drums and sang the lead vocals. It was a struggle and I'm sure there are some dusty boom-box tape recordings buried in Klaus' collection of random embarrassments. Klaus and I pushed each other as far as we could. We always have and still do. It wasn't too long after that that we started getting really heavy into Southern California Pop Punk. Klaus and I formed a band called The Agency in 1995 and wrote music together with our other counterpart Chris Drueke for many years on and off. We officially put out a 7 inch and 3 full length records. The Agency was a band that changed a lot from one record to another. Mostly because we all came from such different musical backgrounds. I was never a melodic musician in the Instrumental sense of the term. I used to write all my lyrics and melodic ideas on these giant pieces of Brown Paper. Since I didn't know how to write melodic notation, I'd draw these vertical lines under the words as to make pitch changes with every line drawn. Short lines were lower notes and tall lines were high notes. I needed someone like Klaus who actually new enough theory and had a good enough ear to bring my songs to life and it worked as long as I remembered the basic melody for the first few words. When you decide to play Punk and you've listened to Progressive rock and classic rock your whole life... interesting things can happen. In 1998 The Agency found our second guitar player Chris Carrabba now of "Dashboard Confessional" and "Further Seems Forever" fame. It was short lived due to seperate touring schedule conflicts. However, I was asked to join Dashboard Confessional in 1999. It wasn't until 2000 that I had my first rehearsal. At the time, I was interested in doing something new for "a while". A while turned into 10 years and counting. By the way, On December 8, 2006 Dashboard Confessional sold out Madison Square Garden. Believe me, I felt as close to being John Bonham than I will ever feel again in my life. It was glorious! So... where was I?... Oh yeah, Paper. I moved to Nashville in 2008 (after a horrible run in LA for a year) searching for a more peaceful and easy lifestyle.  I had started tinkering around on piano in about 2006 and wrote some truly embarrassing songs but it wasn't until Nashville that I started taking it a bit more seriously. I'm still no Pianist but I learned enough basic chords to get some ideas down. Eventually "ideas" turned into this project "Paper". Along the way I suffered through numbing blisters on my fingers trying to demo guitar and bass tracks for these ideas. I've got this old Piano that has never been in tune and I wrote my first three or four songs on it and recorded it. I was so anxious to just write something on my own, I didn't care about tuning. Who's got time to tune a piano when you can barely remember what you did 2 bars ago in the song your writing? So I slapped a mic on it and went to town. Eventually I bought a keyboard and things started sounding human. I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to do this for one reason or another... Paper that is. I needed the right guys to execute the parts that I had "Frankensteined togeher". Craig Schlesinger, a bass player I had known for years around the Miami music scene always got an ear full from me about how "I'm gonna write a record and it's gonna be different from anything I had done prior'... yadda, yadda, yadda.  He was always a kind of "cheerleader" if you will... for me and my attempts. It became pretty obvious that he'd be the guy to play Bass on this record when the time came. Of course Klaus was kind of a no brainer. He's always understood and been a good listener to what I'm trying to get out. Even when It was just written words and Vertical lines. I hope you enjoy listening to a bit of essentially what I've been working on my whole life... Paper. 

You can "like" Paper on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/paperband and follow @paper_music on Twitter! 

Website coming soon.

The Paper record is due to be released later this year. 

Enjoy and thanks for taking the time to listen.

Mike

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