Music Biography Tips

Video Transcript

"Now, you're also going to want to have a bio and your bio is going to tell your story. So, I'm always calling things something different than people normally get because you've got to think about this. You know? People that get press kits, people that book shows and stuff, how many press kits do they get? How many thousands of horribly written stories do they see over and over and over again. So you want to make something interesting. So I call it "Spoken Groove Story." Right? And then I start writing. Here, first thing, "spoken groove is the best way to describe the unfettered energy and rock and roll innovation produced by Peter Nevland and virtuoso guitarist, Paul Finley. With a style and ability to inspire audiences reminiscent of the way Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac exploded for the Beat Generation of the late '60s, they've created an entirely new musical genre." Sounds exciting, right? What to read more? That's the whole point. Make a big intro and then start talking about how you actually started. You have to say something that's relevant to the music industry first and then you can start telling your story, that precious little story that you know you want everyone to hear. Exactly. Well so here's mine. "Peter Nevland had the idea that he was, had no idea what he was getting himself into when he left behind an engineering job at Motorola in September 2002 to team up with Paul Finley, a struggling Catholic guitarist, who calls his guitar "Mary." They had no record deal and name recognition...." So you keep reading your story. You write it out and you write this story. And then you talk about how you started to tour and did all these wonderful things. You talk about Paul, the guitarist. And at the end, you just say, hey they barely begin to scratch the surface of their acoustic potential. "Their unstoppable artistic potential," is what I said. Right? You want to close big, you want to start big, very important in writing. I also threw in this little fifty word bio, because sometimes people don't want this whole, huge thing for the little blurb that they're putting in the newspaper or something. So you want to have something short, sweet, to the point but also makes a big impact on them. So I put this little extra thing in there so that if they need to use that, they can use that as well. All this stuff, you want them reading as long as possible so that they find out as much and want to get to know you."