Geb Zurburg

Music as I remember it came from singing with grandma, driving with mom, MTV in the early 1980's and my dad singing while he did other stuff. I remember assembling pillows, pots and pans to play along with the music video for "Take On Me" and "Sledgehammer". I remember Dad singing "Piano Man" and "Lady in Red". I remember listening to "The Joshua Tree" and "Aqualung" with my mom as we drove down the shore. I remember discovering my parents vinyl collections and listening to Sgt Peppers, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Pink Floyd for the first time. Those experiences nurtured a love of music.

When I was sixteen, my friend Isaac started his own band. They were called Numb and they were loud, screaming and passionate. I loved it. I loved going up there and just hanging out. I was writing poetry at the time, nothing I thought was worthy of anything outside of my own private adolescent world. But Isaac really dug it and started to use the poems as lyrics to Numb's songs. I started coming up when they practiced and got to tinker on the guitar with them. Really fun times!

It took me until I was eighteen to be on stage for the first time, and I technically should never have been allowed. My high school had a school rock group called The Boptones. I auditioned for it my junior year singing a duet on "Battle of Evermore" by Led Zeppelin, and did not make it. I then auditioned again my senior year and played acoustic and sang "Beauty of Grey" by Live and "Elderly Woman..." by Pearl Jam. This time I was sure I had made it. Nope! Apparently though, this caused a bit of a stir. I will never forget Frank Liverani. He had made it and felt it was wrong that I didn't. He and some other Boptones members colluded with the audience to raise $100 to get me on stage at the senior year festival and sing Pearl Jam's "Black" with the Boptones. I was nervous as hell but did it, loved it and wanted to keep doing it. Then college started and so did my musician life.

From 1996 to 2001 I helped found and performed with Five Against One (a Pearl Jam cover band...naturally...see previous Boptones expereince), Vehicle 3 (Lots of King Crimson, Phish, Pavement and TMBG...Jon Abate enters my life), The English Finger, & The Wethers until I left to study in Amsterdam. When I came back I had written a lot of songs. Those songs motivated me to wanting to find a recording studio to do my own record. I thankfully met Mod at that time.

I ended up taking those songs to my friend Mod (Elefant, Radio 4, Ape Fight) who was a budding new engineer and producer at the time. He was already plugged into the NYC indie scene and had studio space in Union City, NJ. Mod and I worked together. It was so easy, lots of chemistry. I brought Jon Abate in on drums (who has been playing with me since 1997 when we started our first original band called Vehicle 3), created what would be the songs for my first solo album. At the same time, I met John Rango, an incredible guitar player, who was also doing his own songs with Mod and employing Jon on drums. We clicked and decided to pool our songs together thus scrapping my solo project. Those songs became part of the first album of our band Echofission. Echofission is the band I cut my teeth with and developed as a musician, performer, social diplomat, and leader. Although I had been in bands before, Echofission proved to be a DIY learning experience that I will always hold dear to my heart. Sometimes the band members did not see eye-to-eye. For one Echofission record, Like Sza Love (2003), Jon Abate and I teamed up with Peter Duncan who played bass and recorded said album. Although we did not last long with Pete, he taught me a lot about how to arrange songs and take my songs to a more mature level. I am thankful for that.

Since the 2002 release of the self-titled first album, Echofission released three more albums, played countless gigs, appeared in the Over the GW Movie Soundtrack and has been heard on TV shows and radio across the country and abroad. Two Echofission albums are available for free download on gebzurburg.com and two others are for sale on iTunes. There is also a collection of Echo B-Sides available for free download at gebzurburg.com that were recorded during the scrapped-solo-session-that-became-the-first-Echofission-album thing I described. Check out the album "The Straights". We released it in 2008 and it was our best. As a co-founder and the principal songwriter of Echofission, I am very proud of those songs and of the band. Starting and maintaining a band is a challenge and can be difficult. But it can also be loads of fun. Echofission will always be in my heart, the happy and the sad, and the music will always be playing somewhere.

2003-2006 was a musically productive era for me. I wrote a lot of songs, many of which were arranged on one collection that I released this year called Mod Sessions Retrospective 2003-2006. I talk about this more near the end of this bio. Also, I toured as a b