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My name is christopher. and i am an artist.
i am an almost 20 year old college sophomore, whose concentration is communication studies and music minor at canisius college. i love it at canisius, it really has helped me grow artistically and academically.
specifically from an artist, i am a musician first and foremost.
i have been singing since like forever! I remember being four years old and singing "I Will Always Love You" in headstart. those are my earliest memories of being a singer. i also remember being very young and loving karaoke machines and tambourines. since being a young singer, i sung in church and briefly took piano lessons. i first realized my dream when i was offered the chance of enrolling in an arts school in my city. i applied and was accepted to the buffalo academy for visual and performing arts in june 2000. i started my fifth grade year at performing arts in september 2000, and graduated from there in june 2008.
during my tenure at performing arts i became a member of the performing arts elementary, junior and select choirs; all under the direction of a mr. frank scinta. this is where i began to develop my already burgeoning affinity for music. learning choral music and being in a choral setting helped my confidence in singing as well as my love of various composers and musical eras.
songwriting is a tool i have begun to use as sort of a therapeutic outlet to express myself. i am a very private person, and i only share some of my feelings to my innermost circle of friends, which is basically composed of a couple who i tell some stuff to. but anyway, songwriting helps me get out things that are hard to say, in just speaking it. the very first song i wrote was called "the thanksgiving song". i basically wrote lyrics on what thanksgiving means to me backed by an instrumental jazz cassette. i had to be around maybe 7 to possibly 9 years old. although i felt very good about it, i didn't start truly writing until i became a teenager. when i started writing more and more songs, they were christian or gospel themed songs because i refused to sing or write r&b material. so i wrote a multitude of religious songs and i became very ambitious to complete and record these songs...
the only problem was that i was like 13 and 14 years of age, and i did not play any sort of instrument. so basically i would come up with a melody in my head and either keep it in my head or record it on cassette tape. this proved to go nowhere because; i guess i was too young and inexperienced. so i left it alone after awhile---
then, the guitar captivated me.
i had had some friends in high school that played guitar. i always thought it was cool, but i never envisioned myself playing. but, after seeing the play so wonderfully, i became enticed and begged my father to buy me an acoustic guitar. he eventually bought me one, and i spent about a year fiddling around and not really learning anything. i basically made up stuff and had no knowledge as far as chords and such. eventually, i received a chord book for my birthday, and i wrote my first song.
it was called "misery", and it was the very first song i wrote on guitar. it was a simple am-a5-em-e chord progression, but i loved it. the lyrics were very explicit, in that it talked about how the person singing cuts themself to be able to feel, cause this woman (misery) keeps hurting him. i loved the song and first performed it at a multi-media show at my high school for my senior year.
then i went to college and took guitar lessons. since then, i have written quite a few songs. most of them are unfinished. mostly all my songs have a common theme: loss.
this is a subject that will be further explored in the second episode of "Making the Song"....................
