Passion, optimism and an enterprising spirit are the warm core of newcomer Casey Barth’s debut album, Make Your Heart Go.  It features a dozen great songs – all originals but one. 

 

Make Your Heart Go was recorded in Casey’s spare time while finishing his last year of high school.  The last newcomer to pull that off a debut, with his maturity, is golden girl Taylor Swift. The male singer-songwriter counterpart lane is pretty open. “This album is the culmination of years filled with sleepless nights and daydreamed afternoons,” says Casey.

 

What makes the debut album a breed apart is that it captures Casey’s poetically ambitious lyrics and romantic sense of melody that adds that to a wild hunger for music’s balm that really only someone his age can summon. From simple recordings such as Oh Siren and Lifeboat to complex arrangements like pulse-quickening title cut, the themes in Casey’s music explore the deeper questions of life's purpose in Keep Dreaming and Come to Rise to longing, lust and heartbreak churned out in the rough textures of Warning Sign, Brightest Eyes and Ill. 

 

The album is available on iTunes.  To promote the album, Casey put together a band to film videos that are available on his website along with Facebook and MySpace pages.  You can also follow him on Twitter.

 

At 18 Casey is a prodigy, with an awesome musical toolkit that includes playing keyboards; acoustic and electric guitar and he’s been happily pounding the drum skins since he was 6. Casey is not so much a boy band as a band inside a boy. 

 

A promising excitement indicator of this young artist’s work is the amazing coterie of musicians that Casey was able to attract to his first project. For starters Make Your Heart Go was produced by Boston musician extraordinaire Brian Maes, who was himself a prodigy and has toured the world performing with rock bands of many persuasions for 30 years and his own killer band, Ernie and the Automatics.

 

Casey’s recording band included simply the best studio musicians in Boston: Kook Lawry (lead guitar), Tim Archibald (bass); Dickie Paris (drums); Willie Archibald (trumpet), Jake Dockterman (saxophone); and John Hesson (guitar/ backing vocals).  ”This project was something very special” says Maes.  “I was able to surround him with the very best musicians that are at my disposal. They’re all pros, and they all felt the same way I did when they heard Casey’s music.” 

 

Casey shows a real hunger for knowledge and really wanting to absorb as much music from the past and present as he can. “Casey has a lot of very strong ideas and a really good sense of vision,” explains Maes. “At the same time he is very open to learn things and change his approach if he feels like he is in the presence of a better idea.”

 

Casey has plenty going on in terms of his ability to stay right on the cutting edge of the knowledge that is available to these Gen Y digital-infused fans.  He knows all that,” says Maes, “but hasn’t really got caught up in it like a lot of other kids his age.  He appreciates things from years gone by as well.” Confident Casey displays a wonderful reach - alternately bringing to ear a walloping dollop of John Mayer, moments of Coldplay, the big hearty blues - plate special of Dave Matthews, echoes of Radiohead and even a little Elton John. 

 

In fact pop keyboard wizard Sir Elton was the catalyst artist who inspired Casey as a performer when he was in 10th Grade. Casey recounts the moment: “I came downstairs one day and my parents were watching Elton John’s 60th Birthday Party at Madison Square Garden.  So I just sat and watched him play.   That show was a real Aha! moment where I connected and knew: WOW! That is what I was MEANT to do.”

 

Thanks to his music-enthused family. “My dad was a songwriter supposedly used his skill to woo my mother when they were in college. He has a great music collection I listened to plenty,” boasts Casey.  He also has two older brothers in the arts giving Casey a baptism in all kinds of music from his Boston hometown that has yielded such greats as Aerosmith, James Taylor, J. Geils Band, The Cars and, well, Boston.   

 

“My first real rock concert was when I was 7,” recalls Casey. “ALL those girls screaming…I thought, Now that’s not a bad job.” 

 

He got his first real taste of the musician life was when his parents bought him and his band some studio recording time as a present for his 16thbirthday.  “It was an amazing, exhausting and thrilling experience.  I knew I wanted more,” says Casey.  Anxious to take it to the next step, he wrote some 25 songs and then scoured the musical landscape to make an album. ‘I needed to sound as good as it did in my imagination,” he says.

 

Casey tries to stay open to inspiration wherever and whenever. “I am just more inspired by the natural sounds of the instrument,” he says, “so that’s how I create music using either a guitar or piano.   I write my lyrics on what is available.” 

 

Casey is inspired plenty, but he’s avidly collecting the musical skills he needs.  He can write and arrange songs, he can play guitar, piano and drums.  He can sing with depth, range and stamina. But he also knows he has lots to learn as so has chosen to matriculate this fall (2010) Columbia College in Chicago. “They just opened up this program for popular music and it is booming.  My favorite thing is to be around a bunch of people who are obsessive about music like me.”