If you are like me, then you may balk for a moment when your friends suggest that you should check out their pal who is a singer-songwriter. The genre has certainly gotten a bad rep over the years with every fraternity bro picking up an acoustic guitar to increase his chances of gettin’ laid, or sorority gal deciding that it’s time to make her high school journal entries and poetry into a song. However, there is something to be admired when someone is brave enough take an instrument, their voice and thoughts, and successfully captivates an audience. Our Griffins a.k.a. DJ Brown is such a young artist with the ability to do just that. The nineteen-year-old multi-instrumentalist is wise beyond his years. Like many great artists and thinkers, he’s not signing up for a college introductory course to figure out what he’d like to be or do in the future. He’s simply just doing it. The unconventional Lehigh Valley recluse, who dropped out of high school after three days and opted for home schooling, discovered his passion for music at the age of ten on a vacation at Disneyland when he listened to a Beatles album that he bought for his sister’s boyfriend. “I fell in love with the music, the experience was so intense I can still recall the smell of the bed sheets in that hotel,” said Brown. From there, he went on to discover a variety of artists and genres through the internet, and seriously picked up the guitar at age fourteen. Inspired by a love for poetry and the words of Bob Dylan, Brown captures the attention of his listeners with earnest, sometimes abstract but universally relatable lyrics and astonishingly beautiful vocals that sound like a mixture of Nick Drake and David Bowie. Take a listen and purchase Our Griffins’ debut EP Conversations HERE, which was mixed by Grammy award winning producer/engineer Stuart Sikes (Loretta Lynn, Cat Power, The White Stripes, etc.). – Q.D. Tran
