|  |  |  |  |  |  | | | | | | Bio of the Artist | Born 1964 in Stuttgart/Germany. Started to play flute and accordion when I was a school boy. Switched to classical/acoustic guitar for some years and finally started with an electric guitar in the age of 15. Played in some bands but without real success until I joined the "pamband". They were ambitious and had a concept: A sophisticated crossover of Rock and Soul, no covers. Unfortunately the vocalist and main songwriter left after some years and I tried to act as the frontman myself. I never liked to play or even sing in front of an audience which of course made my performances not really exciting. After some more years, the project phased out somehow.
Having left my hometown 1996, I joined a duo of semiprofessional entertainers that played oldies and contemporary popular music. This was not really what I wanted, but I learned a lot at that time. Besides this I found some amateurs dedicated to Blues Rock (ZZ Top etc.), and here I found a place to act and play as I wanted. The Blues has always been my fundament, not as a 12-stroked dogma but as a general mind-set, if you know what I mean.
In 2003 I stopped all these activities, as my new job was too time consuming. Since then, I have been doing nearly all by myself ("album" title) if I ever found the necessary time and mood. I bought a drumkit and a new recording machine and started to record my old songs in the beginning of 2005. This activity continues up to today. My poor drumming limits me down to a certain speed, and my even poorer knowledge of homerecording makes every new song a journey to the unknown. But as soon as it starts to sound like me, I start to love it. And this is what you will hear when listening to the "All by myself" compilation on which my wife, Brigitte, plays Keyboard on "My child" and my daughter Isabelle plays piano on "No one around" and bass guitar on "My child".
In early 2009 I entered N1M with some of my songs, and the feedback I received was very positive. I decided to give it a try and went into a recording studio to finally produce a real album. I asked my friend Christian Ortloff to play the drums on some of the faster tracks, and my daughter played piano and keyboards as well as some bass lines. Recorded and mixed by Ted Garner. The album is physically available and can be ordered at jmschoen@t-online.de. mp3 downloads available on amazon and itunes.
In autumn 2011 I met with my old friends from PAMBAND for a weekend workshop where we tried to play some of our old songs but soon turned to work on new songs instead. We found out that there is still a lot of energy in our music and decided to keep this workshop thing up and going. In may 2012 we met for a second one and in november 2012 the third event took place. Roughly half of the songs are written by Christian Frank and the other half by me. We started with "Hope" and "My child" from the "Way of life" album, then "You keep on hidin'" and in the last workshop we recorded completely new songs then: "Decisions" and "This dream of mine". | | |
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