Winter 1996: Justin went rummaging through his basement, trying to find an old guitar case he’d spotted once before. Buried somewhere between molding boxes of old toys and family artifacts was a cardboard case with four rusted latches. Inside was a 1974 Ibanez Dreadnought, the Japanese guitar his mother purchased for his father decades before. The smell of spruce and mahogany, trapped in the case for years, rolled out in waves. A trip to the local music store for Black Diamond strings, and the journey began.
One becomes a fast student of the guitar when trying to learn the alien chord shapes and rhythmic patterns of Dave Matthews. After exhausting that musical catalogue, Justin returned to open chords and the powerful melodies of the folk, rock, and country music traditions. Once he mastered Neil Young’s “Out on the Weekend” he felt like he was on the right path.
Years of being bad at playing the guitar slowly turned into years of being okay. He could passably sing and play, and that was more than enough.
Summer 1999: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five turned words into art, and Justin grew from a reluctant reader into a lover of books. Vonnegut led to Salinger led to Faulkner led to Hemingway led to Morrison led to Huxley led to Palahniuk led to Rimbaud led to Ginsberg led to Baldwin led to Conrad led to Fitzgerald led to DeLillo led to Dostoevsky led to Dideon led to Kundera led to Roth led to Carver led to Ellison led to Camus led to Bukowski led to Nabakov led to McCarthy. There were stories everywhere on the library shelves and all manner of ways to tell them.
The rhythm of storytelling moved back and forth from page to guitar and felt like existence.
Fall 2000: In college Justin befriended fellow musician Josh Kaufman, and they spent late nights together playing, trading songs, and writing a few. Justin’s college baseball teammate, J Seger, put down his guitar for a Fender precision bass, and the trio had a rhythm section. Following an acoustic set on campus, Reno Brown joined the group as the drummer. For a few years the band, dubbed Ten Stories Tall, played shows around Baltimore and the Mid-Atlantic, attracting a comforting following. After graduation, though, everyone went their own way.
But the high of writing songs and playing them for a crowd is hard to shake.
Adulting: What does an unemployed college grad who loves music and literature do? He teaches. Since 2004, Justin has taught literature to high school students. Since 2007, he’s taught American literature of the 1960s, philosophy, and the dense, penetrating works of Cormac McCarthy at the Gilman School in Baltimore, MD. He published some poetry somewhere in there and pursued that cliched dream of English majors everywhere — writing a novel.
Spring 201: His wife pregnant with their first child, Justin wanted to do something special for her as a gift, something to welcome this new life into the world. He picked up his guitar and started writing. The mystical feeling of melody turning into language turning into song was intoxicating. He lingered in the tower of song and kept writing. One song bred two more, and pretty soon Justin had a pile of songs that he could hang his hat on.
Fall 2019: As luck would have it, J Seger, his college friend and bass player from Ten Stories Tall, had moved from Brooklyn, NY, to Asheville, NC, with his talented wife Emily Easterly and built a studio. He traveled to JEm Yard Studios in Asheville and recorded five songs. The world shut down during the blooming spring of 2020. During the summer of 2021, Justin returned to Asheville to record six more songs. The music created during those six days (separated by more than a year of the plague) is called Buyer’s Remorse.
Fall 2022: After getting back into the Baltimore music scene, Justin met Tony Correlli, a local musician, songwriter, producer, and studio owner. In November of 2022, he started tracking a new batch of songs at Deep End Studio. Working with a team of talented, local musicians and singers, Justin finished recording his second album, Ornamental Monsters, in the fall of 2023.
Describing the process of writing songs, Leonard Cohen mused, there are “no rewards other than the work itself.” Thus, the work continues.
