The Road Back to Music

From alt-rock to academia -- and back again

You may know me as a visual artist or professor but I am also a songwriter. Sorry I’ve been quiet here lately as I’ve put a lot of energy into writing songs. This post is about that. Now I’m shifting gears again. Let me know if there’s something you’d like me to write about!

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In the early 2000’s my band was playing to packed houses in Cincinnati, our music connecting deeply with fans. We were unstoppable. Behind the scenes, however, the pressure was at times unbearable. Music producers, managers, and the record label had high expectations we struggled to meet. Then, at twenty-two years old, as the music industry I had staked my dreams on began to crumble under the weight of the digital revolution, so too did aspects of my personal world and my identity as an artist.

Moving away from music wasn’t something that happened overnight. It was a slow and sometimes painful choice. But coming back to music now has been sheer delight. Here’s some of that story.

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In the mid-nineties in rural Ohio, alternative rock music just hung in the air. I was an odd, lanky and suddenly very tall teenager, wandering around my backyard under the maple and oak trees on a sunny day lackadaisically singing the verses to Soundgarden’s alt-rock banger “The Day I Tried to Live”. My friend Jon was within earshot and began encouraging me “You’ve got a great voice! You could be a singer!”

Although I had always identified as an artist, singing was not something that came naturally to me — I was a drawer. I was a shy kid and didn’t really enjoy being in front of people. I liked to be alone and work on my projects. My only stage-related experience was refusing to go onstage during an elementary school play (I was dressed as Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio's sidekick and did not want to be seen wearing tights).

When I started at a conservative Catholic high school my dad had just died and I was angry. I was desperately in need of something to do with all that anger. It was then that a preposterous idea started creeping in: I should become a rock star. Although I still couldn’t really sing I guess people in my life — like my friend Jon under the maple trees — could feel the intensity of my desire to express myself. And so, encouraged by my friends and family, I began to write songs.

Frequently accompanying me to local open-mic jam sessions were my best friends Sam and Travis. Sam was a self-declared fifteen year-old “blow hard” who played drums in the marching band. Travis, who had received a guitar for Christmas, was a go-with-the-flow kind of guy whose subtle humor made him easy to be around and supportive of my creative decisions. I was aloof, often somber. Without the kind of intensive parents or economic comforts that many of the other kids at our private school enjoyed, being rock stars actually seemed like a sensible choice to the three of us, something we could actually do — I was not headed to Yale with my high school grades being C’s and D’s. And so we put everything into music. Eventually, we came out of the garage and started doing shows, the band rounded out with Jason Morgan on bass and T Miller, a charming classically trained cellist and guitarist who was magnetic onstage and off.

Aided by a small stipend from a record producer who discovered us through a friend of a friend, the five of us dropped out of community college and moved into a house together. At night the guys would play video games while I’d retreat to my room to try and write decent songs with big memorable melodic hooks. The house smelled like smoke and beer and trash. During the afternoons we would play our songs over and over again, refining every detail. It wasn’t glamorous but it was effective; within a few months we were a well-oiled Alt Rock machine (cue aggressive guitars).

Crowds at The Mad Frog, a dive bar in Cincinnati, grew in size quickly. New fans were standing, jumping, singing along elbow to elbow. It was loud as hell, extremely hot, extremely late, and exciting. As the speed and energy of my life began picking up, at times I felt like I was along for the ride. Other times I felt like I was breaking down walls. Music was a potent antidote to my sadness and introversion. On stage with the band I was fully present, and began to see myself more fully in relation to other people and art. Music was power, providing a sense of control and connection.

After just a few short years of learning to play our instruments, July For Kings did achieve some of the milestones that set many bands up for international stardom: an active and large regional fan-base, a publishing deal with Time Warner/Chapel, a record deal with MCA Records, national tours etc. We spent a lot of time in a big red van traveling around doing shows, chain-smoking and meeting strangers. I was flying out to New York and L.A. a lot. Prospective managers were sneaking us into night clubs and I met Elton John at his apartment. It was life at hyperspeed, and mostly, it was a blast.

But there was also a lot of pressure. 

It seemed that everyone was counting on me to write a hit single, and on the band to “make it”. And as much as we had accomplished, we could not really take the time to celebrate it. There was always some other milestone to achieve, another show to do. The Cincinnati Enquirer ran a big story entitled “Sink or Swim” about our prospects for success. The local press, our parents and friends and producers and the label and our managers — all these forces were kind of pointed in our direction. We pushed each other hard. There was money riding on it too, and a lot of it: the label MCA and the publisher Warner Chapel had collectively bet a half-million dollars on us — most of which of course subsequently went to mangers and producers and lawyers rather than us.

All of that pressure led to hospital visits, soured relationships with longtime supporters, a long legal battle, and even strained friendships with each other. At the same time, record labels began crumbling as the impact of mp3’s and cd burning had begun to be felt. And here’s the thing: our record hadn’t even come out yet. I was 21 years old. At times we all wanted to quit.

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In the months before the album was finally released, I had a knot in my chest, a sense that things weren’t adding up the way we had hoped. Given the state of the music industry and all the layoffs happening at that time, we were lucky the album, July For Kings’ SWIM even saw the light of day. But it did, and those who loved it really loved it. Thousands of people still do.

I am grateful to have had that experience and to have had it with my best friends. In the following years I made and released a lot of other music both as a solo artist and with the band as we weathered lineup changes and came up with creative ways to make music sustainable (Too much to tell here).

Music was a healing force for me. Through meeting fans and new friends all over the world I learned how we are all just human and about the common bonds we share despite our backgrounds. I learned about doggedly following your heart and your dreams. That my songs connected with a small but energetic audience made me so grateful to be alive and to be able to share my art. By my mid-twenties I felt like I had already lived a lifetime. And although my engagement with music has waxed and waned over the years, that underlying sense of gratitude has never left me. Music ultimately has helped me so much, and remains a core part of who I am.

My career now — as an art professor of painting/intermedia — enables me the kind of creative liberty that I had always dreamed about. It's an unlikely path - from alt-rock frontman to art professor. But the skills that made me a better musician ended up being invaluable in academia: building authentic communities, fostering creative collaboration, leading diverse groups toward a shared vision. And working at a university, in turn, has given me new perspectives on artistic expression and the freedom to rediscover music on my own terms. Although I now often work on projects that may not necessarily have large commercial appeal, I know those projects are valuable. The view that creative work has intrinsic worth and should be celebrated and rewarded is so different from the intensely capitalist, cutthroat and even desperate music industry of the late 90’s and 2000’s. The last few years of being around young people at a university while thinking through visual art has reenergized me. And I’ve managed to find ways to reconnect with my “music brain” — a term I heard recently from a friend and former student of mine whose identity is similarly bifurcated.

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In November 2022 at a reunion show for the 20th anniversary of July For Kings’ major label debut, I stepped on stage for the first time in a long time. I was greeted by the joyful screams of 500 faces — most of them familiar to me as the most committed members of the band’s incredible regional fanbase from twenty years ago. In the bright glow of the lights and the cheerful roar of that audience I nearly broke down and cried. I have performed on hundreds of stages all over the country and those memories run deep. But there is nothing like performing for your home crowd, for your core fanbase. There’s nothing like coming home. For us that is Cincinnati.

There is a myth in the arts that making “fans” means finding those anonymous souls somewhere out there. Rather, our creative journeys begin where we are: our friends and their friends, the cousin you rarely see, the mixing engineer and his uncle. That night of the reunion concert was such a special night, and a chance to reflect on what a welcoming, authentic, and inclusive community we built around the music of our youth. I’ll never take that for granted.

In the months after that show I realized that while I don’t miss the music industry, I do miss the wonderfully supportive, down-to-earth and eternally encouraging group of music fans and wonderful people I once spent so much of my time with. And I missed my bandmates and friends. So I began finding ways to carve out more time for writing. I now have enough solid material for an album or two. Or three.

“The guys” and I are having a blast. I’ve been flying back to Ohio occasionally and working with them in person, and we’ve been trading files and song ideas through the magic internet for many months. The group chat is aglow with song ideas and inside jokes. It’s like picking things up with your favorite cousins, as if we never stopped hanging and laughing. Today the secret is out! we’re now easing into the mixing stages, talking with producers, engineers and record labels, and are so excited to share some new music again, after nearly a decade.

Dan McQuinn, T Miller, Joe Hedges, John McGuire and Brian Ives

For music fans, thanks for hanging in there. Check us out on Instagram and Facebook and JulyForKings.com. If you’re in Ohio, we are doing a little acoustic show and music video premier December 29th as a fundraiser in a few weeks in Middletown, OH. The event will be just steps from a building that once housed the coffeehouse where I sang my very first songs as a teenager.

Whether you’re a friend or fan of my music or interested in my art, thanks for reading my thoughts and being in my life!