Steemit Intro (my short musical story)

Hi SteemFam

I've always been curious as well as mystified by those who can create compelling online introductions.

With that being said, I am setting the intention here at the get go to layer mine with a bit of that style of magic.

So who am I?

My 'real' name is Michael Harrison Carman.

My given name(another story for another post) for my online/stage/and artistic persona is Mikey Owens.

I've been playing and performing music since the age of 15. I'll be 25 in May of 2018.

I began my journey with learning covers of my favorite Cure songs and jamming them with my 2 best friends at the time in the hallways of our highschool during freshman year.

My taste for alternative rock began to evolve into an obsession for learning what even is music. Neo-anything began to fascinate me and my love of psychedelic/transcendental/progressive music pretty much took over my life towards the end of my senior year.

When I was 18 I decided not to go to college because I was convinced the band I was in(The End of Us) was all I wanted to do and had a very strong belief we were going to "make it" lol.

As all good things seem to do, it ended.

I moved to Houston when I was 19 and stayed with my cousin and aunt trying to find something musically to do while existing there but other than making some great friends in the process it led nowhere. After a series of bad career choices over the 3-4 months I was there, I moved back to the small town of Beeville Tx where my mother was.

Transitioning from a city of millions back to a rural town with a populace of under 30K kinda depressed me so I took the first opportunity that presented itself to move to a larger city, Corpus Christi.

Corpus was pretty chill. I began connecting with some of the friends I had in highschool that had decided to move here for College and among one of those friends was a guitarist who I ended up starting the band Modern Explorations with.

We both became extremely passionate about what we were doing and started playing live after recruiting a drummer and bass player. We were eventually gifted studio time and recorded a single titled "Desert Action" at Precision Studios. The positive feedback we recieved gave us a lot of motivation to keep it up and a few months later we went back into the studio to record 3 more songs for an official ep release.

We put out a self-titled ep at the end of 2013 (can be listened here > https://modernexplorations.bandcamp.com/ ) and began organizing a few tours. To my own surprise I was kicked out of the band a week before our biggest tour and was emotionally/psychologically destroyed for a good while after.

I came back to myself and my purpose at the end of 2014 and in 2015 began another musical project by the name of Seismic Flux. After a few months of playing shows my bass player and drummer joined the band Phat Katz and I moved to Denver, Colorado late summer of 2016. This is where my story becomes intertwined with the Cannabis Industry in bigger way than I thought it would, but that too is another story for another post.

After several months of jamming with a drummer I met online I came across another guitarist who happened to be into some of my best friend's obscure bands back in Texas and I just had to play with him. We got together and it was definitely musical love at first sight. We had a great first experience of playing music together but the very next day the drummer we played with informed me he had moved back to Arizona abruptly. Luckily my new friend had been in talks with another drummer who we arranged to meet the day after. Another slam dunk jam and we were on the hunt for a bass player to make it official.

The next weekend we audition a bass player who upon arrival at the practice space realized he'd been on a tour already with the guy playing drums in our group and it all clicked immediately.

We agreed on a name for our project and Picture the Waves was born the first week of January, 2017.

Over the next several months we put everything we had into writing the music we wanted to hear but we couldn't get the drummer to make more time for us so we transitioned our bass player on to drums and went through 4-5 bass players before we found our glue to hold it together.

Once all the characters were in place, things progressed extremely quickly. We began playing shows with some of the best locals acts and getting on a few bigger shows with dope touring bands in our genre.

Throughout 2017 our drummer had been building up his home studio and we recorded a single ourselves and had it mixed by another close friend in the band Though Pilot. The track was mastered by Bryan Shortell( of Equal Vision band Northern Faces) and released Nov-29th 2017.

Blast that ish right here >>> https://picturethewaves.bandcamp.com/

Now I sit reflecting and writing this January 27th, 2018 almost 2 months after releasing our first track.

I am overwhelmed at the love received from people hearing our hard work turned to sound! There are 2 more songs being mixed currently and I can't wait to share those as well.

I supposed now is a good time to inform whoever has read this far that we are in the middle of booking our first diy tour across the south with our friends in the band Wooden Earth from Dallas, TX.

5-25/Denver, CO
5-26/Sante Fe, NM
5-27/Dallas, TX
5-28/Austin, TX
5-29/San Antonio, TX
5-30/Corpus Christi, TX
5-31/Houston, TX
6-1/New Orleans, LA
6-2/Atlanta, GA
6-3/Jacksonville, FL
6-4/Tampa, FL

If your band is from one of these cities and you wanna play or help book, shoot me a message so we can see if it will work out! Email [email protected] or [email protected]

Music and art have always taken priority in my life, unfortunately over my own financial stability most times.

My goal here on Steemit is to share and inspire through my reflection and process while ideally earning some sort of revenue from the openness I channel into this platform.

Thank you for reading, hope to come across your page soon! Keep an eye out for some posts specifically introducing my visual art into this medium, but until then...

Best regards,

Mikey