I was the class clown.

It seemed to the faculty at Lumpkin County Elementary that I could not focus on any work they gave me and it was suggested I may have something wrong with my brain.

As time went on, I became very well acquainted with the elementary school principal. I remember that office room more than any other room in the school.

Staring at the clock, watching the minutes of my life tick away while waiting to be lectured for the 300th time about why I shouldn’t purposely fall out of my chair in the middle of a teacher’s lecture or put tacks in her chair in an attempt to make the classroom laugh.

They didn’t find it amusing.

I was put on experimental ADHD medication which gave me hallucinations. I saw numerous doctors, and long story short I was falsely diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome and placed in special education because the teachers simply couldn’t deal with me.

So I’ve always been a little “different.”

So here I was, not even old enough to qualify as a teenager, teaching myself music production and releasing thousands of songs on the internet while other children were doing their homework, going to the mall or theater together, etc.

This constant stream of positive and negative reviews became the tool with which I measured my self-worth and musical capabilities.

I released around 1500 songs on Newgrounds in the next 4 years, gradually learning the ins-and-outs of electronic music production with no formal training, purely by trial and error.

It was this unconventional upbringing and my, perhaps unhealthy addiction, which would become the foundation of my music career today.

After I graduated High School I was deceived (like most 18-year-old millennials) into abandoning my dreams and pursuing a “safe” career.

I moved to New York and immediately got myself into 18 thousand dollars of debt on a Computer Science Bachelor’s program with Rochester Institute of Technology.

Here is where you might begin to notice a trend…

I don’t know if you have ever worked as a Door to Door salesman in California, but if you’d like me to sum the experience up for you…

It’s quite similar to the experience of running out of gas in the middle of a dangerous neighborhood in 110 degrees weather and having to knock on everyone’s door with a sweat-covered hand to try to convince them to give you money.

It was then that I received my first break, but I won’t call it lucky.

I received a response to a craigslist ad I had put up from a man named Kim Bullard who I agreed to meet for some sushi and to discuss business.

I did not know it at the time but the man I was speaking with was the keyboardist for the Elton John band, and he contacted me to help him produce music for his daughter, Katy Rose.

Not only did this wonderful man pay me substantially more than I had ever been paid before (to him it was probably nothing,) but he introduced me to more and more clients via word of mouth.

He did not know it, but working with Kim Bullard may have single handedly prevented me from becoming homeless.