I also do a bunch of other fun stuff, here are just a few examples…
splitter.fm
I created a cool website called splitter.fm with two of my friends (Jonny Koh and Maxson Jarecki). It started with the idea that it would be awesome to give Lawrence fans the opportunity to explore the individual instruments (or “stems”) from our songs. Soon after the launch of the “Lawrence Stem Player,” we found that not only did our fans love it, but we also had other artists asking if we could make the same for them.
So we created splitter.fm, a website where artists can put up the stems of their songs, give behind-the-scenes annotations and much more. Just a few months in, and we have over 300 artists and over 1000 songs! If you’re a music fan, check it out, and if you’re an artist, set up a profile and upload some tracks!
SOUPbread SOUND
I teamed up with Jordan Cohen and Jonny Koh (two of my bandmates in Lawrence) to create Soupbread Sound, a production company that handles event logistics, tech solutions, equipment rental, creative/musical direction, digital marketing expertise, analytics and budgeting for digital and physical music events. Basically, if you have a cool idea, we’ll make it happen.
In addition to providing gear and services for many physical events (including many Lawrence shows), we gained an expertise in virtual events during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most notably, we handled all production, promotion, and ticketing for Jon Bellion’s Virtual Concert in December 2021 (pictured on the left, with me on piano in the background!), in which Jon performed improvised acoustic and orchestral of his arrangements of his songs for over 7000 ticket holders (an estimated 10k+ viewers), taking requests and questions from the audience chat along the way. We also provided those same services for Lawrence’s Virtual Tour, which included 12 concerts and virtual meet-and-greets with behind-the-scenes videos and q&a.
hi-lo jack
I formed a musical side project with two of my favorite and most talented friends. One is Cody Fitzgerald, founder of the indie-rock band Stolen Jars and a frequent collaborator of mine on my composing work for film and TV projects. The other is Dolapo Akinkugbe, a hip-hop artist who releases music under the name DAP The Contract. The three of us went to college together at Brown University, where we each gained followings on campus with our very different styles of music. We realized that although the music we created was so different on the surface, we actually had a lot of shared influences, not to mention a lot of respect and admiration for each other’s projects. So we got together during our senior year of college and set out to make some music that blended all three of our sounds (soul-pop, indie-rock, hip-hop). What emerged was Hi-Lo Jack (named after a card game we liked to play together during college) — a cinematic, nostalgic, energetic, electronic, experimental, joyful three-headed monster that I’m extremely proud of.
So far, we’ve released just one EP entitled “Old New Clothes,” and played just a small handful of shows, but the sound we created has influenced all three of our individual projects, and it specifically acted as a major reference point for the soundtrack for Disney’s Noelle that Cody and I created. And we’ve got some more music on the way soon!
THE MUSIC LANGUAGE
This one is super random. I love puzzles, codes, and games, so one night during quarantine, I came up with a fun way to encode messages into musical pieces — a “music language” of sorts. I spent a few days practicing it until I was “fluent“ in the language I had created. Once my family was sufficiently bored of watching me do it, I decided to build a simple website that allows anyone to play around with it and try to crack the code (more instructions and info on the site). As silly as the project itself is, I’m proud to say that it’s the most legit thing I’ve ever coded fully myself! Enjoy, and let me know if figure it out!