Gabe Wateski

Hi! I’m Gabe and here’s my story: My mom had this old guitar that sat untouched in our back room for as long as I could remember. It was one of those things that you’ll find in a home – one that blends in and becomes as invisible as the hardwood floors that you learned to walk on. Then one day when I was sixteen, I heard Green Day’s “Time of Your Life (Good Riddance)” and thought it would be really cool to learn the song. At the time I was playing a lot of Guitar Hero III and I thought, “How hard could learning real guitar be? I mean, I’ve already five starred ‘Cliffs of Dover’ by Eric Johnson. I got this.” As an added bonus, I thought learning guitar would be a great way to impress my high school crush at the time (spoiler alert, it didn’t impress anyone). So I dusted off the guitar and haven’t put it down since.

The trajectory of my life was never really the same after that. I spent every spare moment studying my favorite songs, trying to discern what it was about the relationship between a chord structure and melody that evoked an emotional response. Around the time I turned 19, my fascination with composition led me to begin writing songs of my own – they were terrible, of course, but songs nonetheless. It became clear that music had become one of the main forces that was pulling my life forward, which ultimately led me to uproot from my hometown of Onalaska, Wisconsin to move 754 miles south to Nashville, Tennessee.

I unpacked my bags and hit the ground running, working on songs every chance I got between grad school classes and side jobs around town. It seemed like everyone I met played music or wrote songs, and there was something about the creative energy of the city that pushed me to write more, to play better, and to share what I did with the world. Somewhere in the process of writing, recording, re-writing, and re-recording songs just for the fun of it, I realized that I was working towards releasing a collection of my songs into the world. It’s been a long time since I first picked up that guitar, but in many ways, releasing songs into the world for the first time feels like just as much of a starting point as those first days I spent learning chords at sixteen.

I write music drawing from personal experiences with love, infatuation, loneliness, and triumph. From me you’ll hear big, anthemic, guitar-driven choruses, gentle piano ballads, and a range of influences that span from Green Day to John Mayer to The Beatles. Ultimately, my hope in writing songs is that they might become a familiar soundtrack to the ins and outs of the seemingly insignificant moments that make everyday life what it is.