turning a broken heart into art

I’ve spent my entire life making music with and for other people...

...but the Winter and Summer of 2016 were emotionally desolate places for me. I was fresh out of a long term relationship that crash landed with a force that I had never experienced before. In the aftermath, I found myself living alone for the first time in my life. Work was scarce, and social scenarios suddenly filled me with anxiety. I found myself withdrawing from the world as the identity I had come to know myself by now lay in the smoke and ash of what had come before. Broke(n) and trapped in my apartment with the demons who only seem to want to hang out in the dark hours of the deep night, I sifted through the rubble of a battle lost in an attempt to rediscover myself.

Those dark nights gave birth to The Quiet Regret.  

The guitar was a new instrument to me, relatively speaking. I had spent my life behind the drums as a player, and the keyboard was my tool as a composer. My musical pedigree had taught me how to write for other instruments, but there’s a difference between writing for an instrument and being connected to it because it’s yours. I had been casually playing a Martin acoustic guitar I bought for a couple of years, but the electric guitar remained an elusive mistress. Determined to change that, I walked down the street to Chicago Music Exchange and bought a black Fender Stratocaster on credit, not knowing how in the world I would ever pay for it. My journey with that guitar has led me through a period of musical self discovery that has been one of the most rewarding and joyous experiences of my life. Songs were written. Demos were recorded. Revisions were made. More demos were recorded. After a while, a sound started to emerge that was unmistakably me in a way that I had never been able to achieve before.

Fast forward to 2020 - another period of intense isolation born of another tragedy, this time on a global scale. As the world breaks, I have again retreated into the music, exploring and recording the sounds and words of my authentic self - this time to put out into the Universe. The Ashland EP is the culmination of the soul searching and struggle of the past 4 years of my life, and the wreckage of the pandemic has afforded me the mental bandwidth and time to begin to be comfortable enough to live in the new skin this music has gifted me.

The Quiet Regret is my Truth. 

Thank you for listening,

Ethan Deppe

July 2020