I am the third child of four. I have an eldest sister, an older brother and a younger brother. My parents are still married (after 27 years), an increasingly rare feat in this day and age. My life thus far has been mainly a mixed tale of music, travel, drug use, mental exploration and spiritual contemplation.
As far as any of these go, music is my main mission. I started playing bass guitar at 8 years old, while I was living in Southern Maryland. I always had an affinity for percussion, but didn't get an opportunity to try it until I was about 10, after my family moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Next in line was guitar, which I began to pick up on roughly around the same time I started to indulge in Cannabis: age 11.
Naturally the shift from one school to the next, coupled with my recent psychotropic discovery and the onset of puberty, led me to become a very poor student, as well as a growing sense of estrangement from my "peers". That same year, my siblings and I started our first band, Little Wing, which followed largely the path of our father's classic rock cover band: a lot of Hendrix, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Sabbath, Rolling Stones and the like. But by the end of my middle school years, at age 13, the signs of deviation from that path were beginning to show, probably thanks in no small part to growing fascinations with LSD (facilitating a growing interest in reality) and more modern Metal acts like Pantera, System of a Down, Slayer and Rage Against the Machine.
By the time I made it to high school, Little Wing was all but dead. We still played under the name, but our sets were becoming more of an amalgamation between our Classic Rock upbringing, our personal influences with Grunge and Metal, and our own original music, which resembled more than anything, Angst-y Fight Metal.
Around 2001, we renamed the band Aftermath, and meanwhile, began a bit of a trip to the Dark Side when we were introduced to harder drugs like Cocaine and Methamphetamine, as well as a growing penchant for binge drinking.
When I was 16, I was given one of the best birthday gifts I've ever received, as well as one that I was least prepared to understand at the time: a hardback copy of Alex Grey's "Transfigurations". But nonetheless, I saw the importance in it, although I did a terrible job of taking care of my copy.
By the end of school, I started to see it for the system that it is - in design, and was able to graduate early without even really trying. I immediately went to work for my father, along with my older brother, doing construction and carpentry. I continued to do so steadily for the next four years, starting in 2004: using the money we were making to finance travels (a 5,000-mile road trip in 2005; playing St. Patrick's Day in Dublin, Ireland, a Southeast tour of the US, and a cross-country road trip - all in 2006, and going to the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in 2007, followed by a week's vacation on our friend's land in New Hampshire).
But by the end of 2007, the family business had died down considerably, my brother's and my house had burned down and we found ourselves stuck in the same town we had been living in for 12 years with very little prospects.
Over the next couple years, we each worked whatever jobs we could to help out around and the house and meagerly finance our band - which seemed to be the only thing to benefit from our setbacks. Our sound was branching out noticeably, incorporating as many influences as we had discovered from our very beginning to our present. At this time, we decided that we needed to leave Aftermath where it belonged and create our new sounds under a new name - something all-encompassing, as we felt our music was becoming to ourselves. We decided to go under the name Of The Sun.
In the midst of a dying music scene in Myrtle Beach, we moved to Austin, Texas (a place we had never been to, where we knew no one) in August of 2010, to focus our energies more toward making our music what we do with our lives. Only now, a year later, is our effort beginning to show signs of coalescing.
And as far as drug use goes, I still indulge from time to time in hallucinogens and other, more natural, "highs". I also still like to drink alcohol, which I attribute mainly to a preternatural appreciation for literature and authors ;).