SM: How are you?
EM: I am doing good. Happy Saturday.
SM: Happy Saturday to you, too. So when did you get into music?
EM: It developed early in my childhood, this need to be around music and then to, eventually, play it. My earliest memories are of seeing live music somewhere, anywhere.
One of my favorite memories was a wedding reception that I was at. It was probably one of my first memories, I think, I was three. We were at the wedding next door, but they had a live band. They were kind of folk rock, which I grew up in the 80s and that was not particularly common. There were acoustic guitars and a female singer. I could not tell you there names, but I sat there all night.
I think at a certain point, even though I was three, my parents were, like, she is not going anywhere. They would come and check on me ever once and a while, but they pretty much just left me there.
SM: That is pretty cool. And you grew up near Boston, right?
EM: I grew up outside of Boston. In the suburbs of Boston, yeah, not really all that special. My mother is from Pittsburgh, so we used to come back here all the time, like pretty much every year. So when I moved here for school, it pretty much felt like home.
SM: And when did you move here for school?
SM: What a year to start school here...
EM: That was wild, I was here for two or three weeks and I was walking out of my bedroom on Sept. 11 and I was going to a class I hadn’t actually made it to yet in that semester. I remember thinking that the mailman was totally crazy as he came out ranting and raving about terrorists and buildings falling. I thought our mailman was psychotic, but then an hour or so later, I figured out what was going on.
SM: That is a mighty big welcome to a new place and with starting school.
EM: I had a lot of friends in New York City for their first semester of school. And they had post-traumatic stress disorder from that day from just moving to NYC and having that happen.
SM: Focusing on something more positive, how did you start playing music in Boston or did you start playing in earnest here?
EM: I had sort of been playing piano. It was another one of those coincidences where I ran into a lounge pianist. I sat myself next to her, I was about six or seven. She became my teacher. She was teaching me things by the end of the night, she probably figured that was the only way to keep me occupied. She taught me “Ode to Joy” that night on the lounge piano. She was my teacher for a few years after that.
When I had to switch teachers I kind of rebelled. She taught me how to hear music. She really gave me the opportunity to explore listening to music. I play by ear. I don’t read music very well at all. She gave me the fundamentals of that, but I’m not fluent in it.
The next teacher I got expected me to be fluent in the fundamentals and wouldn’t play anything for me at first. He was fired pretty quick.
SM: Some of the great musicians, like Paul McCartney to this day, can't read music. He can play by hear and knows what he wants to hear, but can’t write it or follow it.
EM: I guess I’m in pretty good company then (laughs).
SM: I would say so. It is something to just be able to hear the music and then play it.
EM: It is a blessing.
I know a lot of people that are straight up sheet-reading musicians. Classically trained, and classically trained has nothing to do with improvisation. In jazz, they are taught to improvise.
I’m sort of an anomaly, where I am classically trained by ear. People that read music completely have limited ability to improvise. They have told me that they feel it is a hinderance to them in their musical freedom and that is something I never really lacked. I have always felt that; freedom.
SM: That is true. There is a limitation to the classical form. Someone like you who picked up things on your own and have taken them to use as your own as an advantage.
EM: There is a wonderful thing that happens with a certain amount of structure which is that you have a space in which you can improvise. I am glad I got enough structure, so that I know how to put a framework around what I am doing. So that it is not all abstract. Part of the reason I perform is that I want to share this music with other people and I can’t do that if I’m doing stuff that is completely new. There has to be some type of framework for which they can understand the music and be able to hear it. Whether it is particular chords or verses and choruses, it really doesn’t matter what the structure is as long as there is structure there.
Freedom is important though.
SM: As long as you have the foundation of the house, you can build whatever you want on top of that.
EM: And the more solid the foundation the higher you can build that house if you have the strength and courage to move upward and onward.
SM: It is about moving forward, always moving forward.
EM: Yeah, you can’t get stuck. Every time I have gotten stuck in writing patterns they have lead me to creative blocks.
SM: You were always the solo performer, you were playing in other bands before, right?
EM: Yeah, I have had a couple different projects in Pittsburgh. And going back to answer you question about where I got started; open mics. I did my first open mic when I was a junior in high school. I had been playing guitar for a couple of years. I just sang that night.
When I moved to Pittsburgh, I did the open mic thing again. I really loved it and was comfortable doing it. I guess that the first real band that I had, we were a little abnormal with our instrumentation, but we were called Twin Liberties. We had an acoustic guitarist, a cellist and myself. That was the whole of the band for most of our existence.
SM: That is definitely different.
EM: All strings. It was great because the guitarist was finger-picking melodically and almost flawless in his execution. Our cellist was very experimental and would come up with these incredible melodies and then he could fall back into rhythm. It was a really great project. We were all songwriters, so we were never short for material.
SM: So when did you strike out on your own?
EM: I have had a couple other bands in there that were other styles. I don’t know if I ever picked the singer/songwriter thing, I just always have done that beside the bands. I had a Turkish band for awhile that played straight-up Turkish folk music.
SM: Really?
EM: Yeah. I sing, I play drums. When and however I can be around music I am. Because I don’t have a band right now, this is what I do, I play solo. So that I can be around other musicians and I can share what I have and continue to do what I love to do.
SM: You’re like a one-man band.
EM: I tried to get a loop pedal once and it didn’t work (laughs). It was too many cables and microphones. I prefer the acoustic instruments in general.
SM: Are you working on any kind of album, or what is your plan for the new year?
EM: People that know me awhile and hear me say that I am working on it will probably roll their eyes at this point. I have been talking about putting a solo album out for two years now.
Friends are like, you are not in a band now, we want to hear your stuff. So I said ok and I did the Kickstarter thing, which I didn’t think would be successful. I did it because my thought was if people want me to do a solo record, I will do a solo album. Then it got funded and I didn’t know what to do. So I made this plan for moving forward with it. I did some recording on the ground level, but then I had an injury that sidelined me.
My dog got into a dogfight and I lost feeling in most of my arm due to one of the dogs biting me and I was supposed to be in the studio recording at the time in April of 2010. So I had to rehab most of last year. I’ve been working on a lot of new material which has kept me away from the studio.
I am working on it. I have plans to go to Nashville and do a couple songs. In the meantime, I have been working on laying some tracks down to get the process moving forward again.
But after April of 2010, I just had to take care of myself.
SM: That is understandable. What size dogs are we talking about here?
EM: German Shepherd and Pitbull Ridgeback.
SM: Sweet Jesus.
EM: It was no chihuahua fight that is for sure.
SM: Were you trying to pull the dogs apart?
EM: Yeah. I got bit by accident. They were just trying to get at each other. I, basically, got caught by the dog that was defending itself.
SM: Wow.
EM: Yeah.
SM: On to less painful things, you said you are going to Nashville to record a couple songs?
EM: Yes, there are a lot of ex-pats from Pittsburgh in Nashville now. A lot of really good talent left Pittsburgh to go to Nashville. I wondered why they did that, but there is still so much talent left here that it is uncanny.
SM: It is like Pittsburgh is finally on the verge of defining its music self.
EM: Here is what at least I hope will happen. It think Pittsburgh is happening in its own way. There are couple of things that have got some national, and even international, recognition and that is what Pittsburgh is; our landscape is 88 neighborhoods make up Pittsburgh. We then have 88 different scenes that make up our Pittsburgh music scene.
The hip-hop community has got a couple people signed recently. The heavy metal community has had some people signed and playing internationally.
On every level, I think people are seeing different levels of success. There really is no way to put one label on the whole thing. Our music scene is based on people living here not expecting to make it big here because there is not a whole lot of industry for that here.
A lot of people do move to Nashville. They do go to LA. People that want to make something, they want to be celebrities or they want to make it their full career.
I love to play music, but I can live here and I can survive. And if I decide I want to make it, then I can do that too. I love my life here and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
photo credit: Kevin Ross
photo credit: Kevin Ross