WHAT WOULD BE THE TITLE OF YOUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY: “No One Listens to Oren – A life Lesson In The Fine Art of Dying” or “Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail – Avoidance Techniques For The Decision Impaired”

YOUR STORY:
Somewhere in the northeast, a black cloud formed by being darkened by bad luck and hardship…it floated towards an army base in New Jersey and arrived on January 3rd as I was being born. The luck that would follow me for the rest of my days on this planet had hence been determined. At age 5, I was given an acoustic guitar, which was promptly taken away from me by my grandmother, her reasoning was that my hands were too small to play it, so I should play nothing. From that moment I started writing songs (as a five year old can) and knew I wanted to be a musician. But I didn’t want to just sing or play, I wanted to be in a band.

This was further magnified in junior high when I crafted 5 fake microphones out of paper to give to all my best friends, who of course would be in a band with me. We made recordings that were stellar – at least to our 12 year old ears!
In high school, I was flip flopped around a bit between Brooklyn NY and Bradford PA, and while Brooklyn liked disco, Bradford liked hard rock, so I brought that back to Brooklyn with me one January, along with my MC (motorcycle jacket) and thusly killed any hope for a normal life by joining the metal head crowd in my new high school ER Murrow in Brooklyn. It was around then that I got my first electric guitar, much to the chagrin of my educational superiors, as that just led to me cutting class daily to go play in various bands or to go hand out by Electric Ladyland studios in NYC’s Greenwich village area.

My first real gig was when I was 16 and it was in our high school football field which was packed due to a school festival. Ed, my current and only drummer, was in that band with me and has been ever since. We were called Innocent Child – look it up on MySpace, you can still hear the first real song I wrote and recorded called “South Side”…When HS was over – or close to it anyhow – Ed and myself needed a few new band mates and a better place to rehearse, which due to lack of funds, dropped us smack in the middle of long island. So at 17 years old, I didn’t tell my mother I was moving out, but I went out to my rehearsal space and just started sleeping there, gradually she got the idea that I wasn’t coming back. I've ate, slept and breathed this disease called music ever since. Day and night it has corrupted my system and my soul forcing me to keep going and working towards making it my career. Music is a fickle mistress, she lifts you up just to drop you down harder, just to lift you up again and I wouldn’t trade the falls I've taken for any amount of money in the world. In my opinion, when I listen to a piece of music so good that all the hairs on my back stand up, that is the universe speaking to you, and that’s the emotion I'd like to invoke to anyone who listens to my bands' music. That’s right, I want to touch you all….in a way that makes you just a little bit left of comfortable…and oh yeah, I use my thumb when I play guitar, too bad teachers, deal with it!