Music has always been a very important part of my life since I was a child. I am not sure whether the fact that my parents took me to a Garth Brooks concert while I was still in-utero or just a natural instinct, but from the time I was actually cognitive, there has been something about music that makes me want to move and stop paying attention to the troubles around me. Growing up, my parents were always showing me a wide variety of music from Great Big Sea, being my first concert, all the way to The Ramones and everything in between. They wanted to make sure that as I became my own person I got to experience as much of the musical spectrum as possible so I could figure out where my own taste lived.

Though I always loved music, it wasn’t until I got to high school that I had an interest in actually playing and creating music. Trevor [Bowman, bassist], and I grew up together in a little rural town called Elmira, Ontario. Being such a small town, there really wasn’t much to do to keep young people busy, especially in the entertainment space; so we were forced to get a little more creative to sustain ourselves and stay out of trouble. This is going to sound extremely fantastical, but months after I started trying to teach myself how to play the guitar, I remember Trevor boldly suggesting while we were at school that it would be super cool if we started a band. He recommended that he buy a bass guitar and learn how to play since I already had a guitar at home. That was the beginning of our long journey together. After learning a few simple cover songs, we found some other friends who played music and started the first version of Excuses Excuses (called Stained Glass Army).

For Trev and I, when we hit the stage for the first few times, it was like a part of us woke up from a deep hibernation. We were absolutely hooked on the feeling of standing in front of a crowd, sharing our passion and getting to be whatever we wanted to be for those brief moments. It was the most energizing and relieving feeling we had ever experienced, and right away we knew we had found something special within ourselves that we needed to pursue. As we kept playing and learning, these feelings only got stronger to the point where we spent countless late nights talking in wonder about how we could find a way to turn our passion into a living, expressing that neither of us could really see ourselves being happy without it even though we had only been working at it for a few short years. That was the moment we knew we not only wanted, but needed, to make music.

After that we really started investing our time and money into music, even though many of the other members of our high school band began to move on. We ended up briefly going to school in Kingston, Ontario, where we met Jason [Nicoll, drummer] through friends at Trevor’s college after we hadn’t been active in several months. When we started hanging out with Jason it was an instant click, and as we began to practice with him, that love and need for playing was instantly reinvigorated. Though we didn’t know where it would take us at this point, we played our first official show as Excuses Excuses on the university campus with our good pals in a rock band called Kasador after practicing with Jay only a handful of times. It was surreal… Not only did Trevor and I feel like we came back to life, but I like to believe that was the moment that we helped ignite the spark of passion in Jay. Sure, we already knew that we needed the music, but that was the moment that we realized how and with whom we wanted to make music. That was the moment that we truly became Excuses Excuses.