A hyper-fundamentalist christian home-school cult in Indiana was a mother****er of a place for an artist to try to grow up. Still, those wide open flat spaces (emotionally and in 3D reality) inform my songs and how I record them. Landscape and sound are interrelated. Feelings sweep across open planes and disappear over horizons.
I was isolated from all popular music. This was the 1980s and my parents still had their leftover vinyl collection of classical music, strange church songs recorded in the 70s, and Sousa marches. I remember, age 5 or so, loving the rhythm and excitement of Sousa marches, the hypnotic repetition of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, and the drama and emotion of The Nutcracker. Many of my creative choices are still heavily influenced by early that musical diet.
I quit school when I was 11 and learned to play various instruments and to record myself. I was more excited about this particular path than were my folks and I found myself locked in a battle of wills with my ex-marine-fighter-pilot/electrical-engineer father for several years. To be fair, he taught me to harmonize and to understand and hear major and minor intervals. He had a latent musical talent of his own, but didn’t think it was possible to make a living in “entertainment”. Still, I was allowed to work, mowing lawns around my small town, to save up money for a guitar, then some other instruments, recording gear, and by my mid-teens was a busy musician and (I liked to believe) recording engineer.
I moved to Nashville: I couldn’t find a job so I gave plasma at the blood bank for a while so I could keep buying calories. Eventually I found my way into a touring band and made my living that way for several years intermixed with restaurant gigs.
I moved to NYC, found a partner, lost a partner, fell into a depression and experienced my own dark night of the soul.
I found my way to a good therapist and began healing by unlearning false beliefs which had been tagging around since my childhood. I began to replace them with a certain type of care for my own inner being—for my child self. It was not properly love, but the closest I had gotten to it. Eventually the seeds of care grew and I began to hold myself in high regard and to protect this precious heart.
If you relate to any of this, maybe you will hear it, too, in some of the sounds I make. If so, and you like the way it makes you feel then I guess we are birds of a feather.
Wishing you all the best. -Enoch Porch
