Biography

Tiraid

Tiraid started when Jim and Matt became friends and bonded over a love of music around 2000. Jim started playing guitar at an early age and Matt was just learning, but was happy to be the singer and make up words and melodies on the fly. Jimmy joined as the bassist and for a while the band jokingly called themselves 'Minus Drummer' as they played house parties. Steve joined the band on drums and Tiraid was formed. They wrote a lot of music, more than they were able to capture on CD and played a variety of shows around Ellensburg, Washington for locals, friends and other college kids.

It was 2002 or 2003 when they finally split up. Basically, they all graduated from college and had different things happening. Bands today are able to write music together even though they are not located in the same area, but technology wasn't quite there yet in 2003. If they didn't live close together it was going to be hard to make time to create more music and practice. Steve went to the Air Force and became a pilot; today he actually flies planes that dump water on forest fires. Jimmy is an aviation lawyer who is a partner at a firm in Downtown. Jim and Matt are still close. Matt considers him one of his best friends even though thet don't get to see each other often. He lives near Portland with his wife and two kids. Since Tiraid ended, Jim had a couple other bands, one of which I got to fill in as the lead singer for a couple months a few years back. To this day, they still trade guitar riffs and songs over email.

Solo Career

"Most of it was done with Jim's multi-track recorder that included a drum machine. I'm a bit of a novice with it, but was able to find the right groove to songs that I had already written or create new songs all together with the drums as a starting place. All the songs on four were created on the fly in the studio. For "Ordinary Sin", I had the structure, melody and lyrics. Once I was ready to record, I would lay down a ghost track of the entire song to a metronome. Then using that ghost track I created a drum sound and structure that I wanted for the entire song. With the drums done, I would re-record the guitar (alone), then add a bass line. With the entire structure of the song in place I would then record the vocals." --Matt

Hiatus

Matt started working with a producer (Mark) in late 2019 to record 5 of six new songs. Mark has his own studio at his house and in February they did a test song together. Just as they were planning on doing the rest, COVID hit and they has been in lockdown since. Mark's wife works at Seattle Children's hospital.

"I did go through a long stretch where I did not like anything that I was writing. Basically from 2010 to 2017, I wrote one or maybe two songs I liked. Something switched in 2017 when I started approaching it differently and I discovered a new sound and direction which I am having a great time exploring and now I have a ton of songs ready to be recorded. I am super excited to work with Mark and record these new songs. He is great to work with and in our test song was able to add depth and meaning to areas of the song to really give it more life than I could have imagined." --Matt

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