When I was growing up, I played soccer. One of the things I took from this experience of playing sports was to keep challenging myself. I was originally from Brooklyn, then moved to Long Island when I was really young. I would always go into Manhattan, all the time, just ’cause it just felt like the place, the source. Then I moved there when I was in my late teens and not really sure what to do. I was really clueless about the music business in general.

I grew up with an academic family, in an environment where education was extremely important, but then my mother passed away and I decided I wanted to search a little more for meaning. So I did, in New York. I was just struggling with some bands, and just trying, doing what you do – playing some shows and rock it at all those dives. And just experimenting with songwriting, and I had no idea where to go with that. There is not a school for that. I mean, there is, but I didn’t go to it.

I was doing it for awhile, I started late 90s, early 2000s. I was writing songs and doing it, we call it DIY – do it yourself. I was driving around in a van with my band and playing shows all over the US, small shows.

Sometimes there would be a bartender working at the bar and that would be it, so we’d play the whole show to the bartender. I had a little thing happening and that led to a major label deal with Island Deaf Jam.

From 2006 to 2009, I was in the major label system, and I wrote somewhere in the area of about 140 songs for me, as an artist. When you get signed to a label, if you didn’t already have your whole record ready, you start writing songs for it. I wrote a lot of songs with a lot of big songwriters, I learned a lot. But no record ever came out.

And I realized, also, that I was somewhat prolific at writing songs. One of them in particular got picked up by The Backstreet Boys, and there was this “aha!” kind of moment, that a song that you wrote for yourself could be picked up by another artist. It was like a watershed moment of sorts, what I felt was, like: oh! I didn’t know that it could happen.

And then I got the publishing deal, which is like a record deal for writers and I was like, “Oh, that’s cool, I’ll just be a songwriter.” And I just started writing songs constantly, like a few a week every week, for years. I thought that was gonna be what I did. And I loved it. I was cool with that ‘cause I’d been, for a long time, trying to do my stuff. And then I got a big song with Rihanna, and I was getting songs with other big people, Christina Aguilera and Rita Ora. I was getting bigger cuts.

And then, oddly, that brought me back around to myself.The artist thing kept calling me back. I was inspired. I started playing the ukulele, in addition to the guitar. The simplicity and the fun of that instrument opened up a door in my heart back to myself, and to music for myself, and I was playing for fun. I was also singing every week one song with friends at a club in LA, and that got me back into being excited just to perform in front of people, ’cause it was fun.

I then wrote “Into The Wild,” which got put in a commercial. I signed to Warner Bros. at the same time and stayed with them for two years, but it took too long for my record [Forever For Now – editors’ note] to come out, for a multitude of reasons. By the time it did, everyone who had worked with me and believed in me at the label had left, so it wasn’t being pushed.

It’s funny, because in that low period, when my record was getting no attention and things were like, “fuck”, I wrote “Lost On You,” “Muddy Waters,” and “Strange.” I played them for Warner Bros., but they dropped me. Three months later, Vagrant Records signed me and I released an EP to see if anything would stick and would hopefully get a bit of indie coverage.

Around January of 2016, I got a direct message on Instagram, which I had just started checking then. A guy from Greece, Panagiotis was his name, he said he tried to contact the label, but he didn’t get a call back, could he trouble me for my info, with my managers and my publisher. So I said “sure” and I totally forgot about it, ’cause I thought it was a film, TV kind of thing. A few months later, I’m hearing, like, it’s charting [the song “Lost On You” – editor’s note], I was like: ”charting, what does that even mean?”

It was playing on the radio, and it went number one there and stayed there for like seven months or more… And it’s been number one in almost 20 territories [in Europe – editor’s note] or something like that, and it’s gone golden and platinum in a bunch of places. It’s just interesting. With all the experience I have of my own self, and of other artists that I work with as a songwriter, it’s been the most interesting thing I’ve seen [laughs], to be honest.