As a kid, I grew up in a very conservative Christian atmosphere where the only music we were allowed to listen to was, of course, Christian contemporary or children's songs. As I got a little older, there were a few CD's I clung to like Stephen Curtis Chapman's Dive album, or Geoff Moore and the Distance's A Friend Like U album. I'd listen to those on repeat and even as I'm typing this, I hadn't thought of the latter one in probably 20 or so years and I had to go down a Google rabbit hole to actually remind myself of the name of the artist, which actually made me a bit sad. Geoff Moore was a huge part of my early musical upbringing, and I hadn't really considered it until now. However, as a kid you listen to music because it's catchy and it satisfies something in your brain that nothing else does, which is the state most people don't ever grow beyond. It's not until you learn an instrument, and actually want to learn and not just learn because you were told to, where your brain starts to dissect a song and pick apart each instrument and vocal part. That's where the immense appreciation and fascination of music is born, and generally when people become an artist themselves, to play along or to create their own. That happened to me eventually, but in a roundabout way.
The first instrument I learned to play was the alto saxophone in fifth grade. I was forced to learn one, and I think my parent's even chose it for me. I didn't hate it but it wasn't something I went in to do myself, so there was always an element of it being a chore rather than a hobby. I learned to read music and to play in a concert band, which I remained in until eighth grade. I played on my church's worship team occasionally as well, which was something I definitely didn't sign up for usually. During this time though, I went from loving a handful of contemporary Christian albums, to becoming obsessed with film orchestral soundtracks, since they involved the type of music I was playing. The two CD's I'd listen to on repeat were Star Wars Revenge of the Sith and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and I listened to those on repeat over and over, especially the latter. I was obsessed with Star Wars, so that just compounded the amount of time I listened to it's soundtracks. Back then we had portable CD players, and I completely wore out that CD during that era, and then my first MP3 player at first only had those 2 CD's on it for about a year. It wasn't until sixth grade when I made it back to contemporary music, but not the previous ones.
Fitting in
Middle school is where hormones and puberty are in full play, and with it comes trying to fit in and eliminate as many reasons to be made of as you can. Though sixth grade was technically part of what they called the "intermediate school" in our school system to help bridge the gap between elementary age (1st through 4th) and middle school age (7th and 8th), but sixth grade felt like middle school to me, because everyone was changing drastically that year. Everyone was moving on from being a kid to getting into more "grown up" things. I felt like I needed to catch up in various ways, and music was one of those things. The catch was I still couldn't listen to anything that wasn't Christian music, so anything kids were listening to at school was off limits. So I ventured into the CCM genre, where youth group kids go to find Christian artists that are similar to mainstream ones. I remember sitting down and going through all of the CD's that my older brother had, and aiming to find one that he wasn't as obsessed with. I wanted to find one unique to me, that I could call my own favorite artist. I listened to a few, and the one that immediately hooked me from the opening track was Switchfoot's Nothing is Sound. I loved the cover art, I loved the darker tone and the lyrics were intriguing to me. I didn't want Christian worship music, just music written from a Christian's perspective, and Switchfoot's lyrics met that requirement and went far beyond it by being deep, philosophical, and reflective. I ripped it to my MP3 player and was obsessed. I listened to that album on repeat for weeks, until I remembered my brother had another album of theirs I remember listening to before, so I found The Beautiful Letdown and the obsession continued with those two albums for about a year.
My first band
During that year, I naturally became interested in, like I mentioned earlier, dissecting the songs and hearing each instrument and element of the songs. I wanted to learn guitar so bad so that I could play along with them. Saxophone was out, guitar was in. Except this time I was doing it for my own interest and obsession, not because I was told to. That is a huge element of motivation for anyone, but especially me. I begged for an electric guitar for Christmas and my birthday. I can’t remember the occasion I got one, but both me and my friend Tyler got the same set with it’s own little amp: a Fender “Starcaster” which is basically a cheap beginner version of the Stratocaster. We began to learn how to play on our own, and eventually started getting lessons from a friend at our church, Don. He taught us a ton in the basics of guitar, learning to play to written music (which I knew of course, but Tyler was learning), playing to tab, and as we got better and better, he’d let us bring songs to him to learn so he can then teach us to play, until we were able to do it on our own with the help of the internet. It was also during this time when we were starting to dabble in writing our own music. We had friends in our church youth group that were already in a band and writing their own music, and they were big inspirations for us to do that same. We looped in our friend David to play bass for us, which eventually turned into drums instead, and we were officially a band. We went with the name “Second Start” and our first song came along pretty quickly with the help of our mentor, Don. We had the bones of the song and I made sure we were structuring the chords correctly for the key, and other helpful tips. He also helped us record it in his basement studio. That was my first exposure to recording and editing and using a DAW like Pro Tools on the computer to do it all. I was hooked. I loved that process of creating a song and putting it all together in that setting. I enjoyed that so much more than actually performing as a band.
Since we were still in middle school and early high school during the band’s lifespan, there wasn’t a ton of progress on making a name for ourselves in terms of fans or a following. We played a handful of shows, like a church picnic, our 8th grade dance, a local festival, etc. We kept writing music though, and kept practicing in David’s garage. It was a ton of fun, and we ended up with a whole album’s worth of songs that we ripped to CDs to give to people. Shortly after we finalized the album though, we were going into our sophomore year of high school. Though Tyler and I wanted this to be our focus of our lives and careers going forward, David had other priorities and was too busy to put time into the band and disagreed with the style of music he wanted us to be, so we eventually decided to just disband. During the time that we were often just waiting for David to be available though, I had already been working on my own solo music. I realized I enjoyed the writing and producing side of the whole concept, that it became my main hobby for years. I was writing like a song or two a day for a long time. It all just came so naturally to me. A lot of those songs I wrote I ended up recording and I have 2 EP's worth of those old songs. I intended on them being Second Start songs eventually, but after we disbanded I leaned hard into my solo project under my own name. I originally released those songs online back then, and I was really happy with it all.
New attempts
Since we didn’t have a band anymore, Tyler and I decided to start a new project we called “Prominent Promise”. Instead of a full band, we planned to just write more acoustic and stripped-down style of music since there was only two of us. The first thing we made for this was a cover of Mayday Parade’s Miserable At Best, and started writing a couple more songs for it, but our senior year, I started dating my first girlfriend, Brittany. She took interest in everything I had interest in, and that included making music. She wanted to write her own songs with my help. So I helped her write a song, and got Tyler involved to help too. We put together a really good song called “Worn Edges, Torn Pages”, and the 3 of us decided to start our own little singer/songwriter trio that we called “The Beautiful Disposition”. Tyler wrote a couple songs, I wrote one, and we had a nice little EP put together that we put online. The project fizzled out soon after that, as Brittany and I went to college together and Tyler got married about a year later.
College years
I attended Greenville College (now University) and majored in Audio Engineering, which is a Bachelor of Science but at Greenville it is a full fat music degree. You are expected to take instrument lessons, play in bands, and take music theory classes as part of your degree. Despite me being a musician, I absolutely hated that aspect of my time there. I wanted to learn audio engineering in the studio and front-of-house, not spend most of my time learning songs and music theory. I’m terrible at theory, I failed one of those classes. It’s basically math, which I’m also terrible at. However, I did have some really cool audio classes, and I learned a lot. Playing in a couple of the bands I was forced to do was fun too, it was nice being in a band again. All four years I was there, I also worked on my solo music when I could. However, being at a liberal arts school gave me massive imposter syndrome as a musician. There were insanely talented artists there that I didn’t even come close to holding a candle to, so I lost a lot of confidence and motivation in making music while I was there. I’d write a song and get it finished up in the studio and then hear one of the bands down the hall listening to their final mix and just blows mine out of the water. It’s crazy how talented some people can be.
After going through a really hard breakup my junior year, I got more inspired to write, as it does. That’s a big reason why I’m writing this at all actually. Heartbreak makes my creative juices flow, I suppose. I wrote a song called Revived, which was heavily Owl City-inspired, musically. Lyrically it was about genuinely not knowing if I’d make it through that emotional time of my life. I was extremely proud of the song though, and I decided to make it one of the songs I could use for my senior project, which involved editing, mixing, mastering 7 songs (not supposed to be your own, but I got it approved!). I even entered it in the music awards that the music department held every year. I ended up getting past the nomination stage, so I was mentioned in the ceremony, which was huge for me, even if I didn’t win. It gave me a big boost of confidence I needed to keep making music, even if it’s all just for fun and self-gratification, and ultimately a kind of therapy. From there, Grey Harbor was born.
Grey Harbor
Before this point, I had just been releasing my music under my name, Brad Linder. My inspiration for that wasn’t just the many artists that do that, but the lead singer for Switchfoot did that with his acoustic side project, while still remaining in the band. I originally had always hoped my solo music would be a side project to eventually be in a band again as my main act, but it was clear that was never going to happen, mostly because I just didn’t want it to. I had grown out of the dream to become a professional musician somewhere along the way during my time at Greenville. But I also didn’t want to just keep using my name for my music, I wanted to have a band name for the project in case I ended up growing it beyond just myself. With one-man artists like Owl City and The Rocket Summer as my inspirations, I created Grey Harbor. I had 3-4 songs in the works during this time, and the goal was to get enough songs to release a full album under this new name. One song, was taken from an old demo I had made for Second Start’s second album years before that never got to get finished because it was a full band song, with electric guitars, bass, and drums. I wanted Grey Harbor to be a full band act, even if it meant I couldn’t play all of the instruments myself; mainly drums. I rely a lot on samples of drums in my music, but this was 2015-2016, and plugins like Steven Slate drums were still in their early days. I enlisted help from my friend David once again, to help me record drums for the two songs I was working on. I had him drive out to Greenville and stay for a weekend and record the drums in the studio. It was a blast and a really unique experience actually being in the studio working on your own music, rather than someone else’s. Those songs ended up being called Enemy and Obdurate Heart. If you listen back to those, you can definitely tell they were in-studio drums. Recording drums is one of the hardest things to do, especially if you want a very clean and produced sound to them. My production on those isn’t great, but I was proud of them at the time. The last song I wrote and finished before graduating was Summer Rain. I remember recording those vocals in the vocal booth late at night, because my voice cracked at once point and someone heard it and mentioned it after I came out. Embarrassing, but we had a good laugh about it!
First album
After I graduated from Greenville, I moved to Chicago with the intention of getting an internship at a recording studio up there. I was living with my friend Nate, and I kept working hard at writing enough songs to call it an album: ten songs. I pulled in a couple songs I had written years prior that I just hadn’t finished yet, and finished those to join the roster. The last song I wrote for the album was “I’m Left Here Sinking” and I think it ended up being the best on the album, personally. Even though it rehashed more of the same lyrical themes from two other songs on the album already, I think it nailed it the best. I was at nine songs, and was struggling to come up with a tenth song, and I was too excited to release this album to wait for it to come to me, so I decided to make an instrumental track as an intro to Revived. Normally I’m not a political person, nor one to even really be tuned into the news, especially nowadays, but that month is when the Dallas police shootings happened, which was a huge tragic event that shocked the country and the world. I was watching some of the coverage and decided to include some bits of it in the song I was making, and make it stand alone rather than be an intro to Revived, despite it being similar, sonically.
So then the album was done! I titled it Summer Rain after the first song, and made the artwork. I wanted it bright and vibrant to act as a complementary opposition of the more depressing nature of the album, to show that even if they are mostly sad songs, things will still be okay. The rain brings new life. So I released the album, had it distributed to digital platforms only at first, and I had plans to make a small order of CDs as well. I was really looking forward to just seeing my first official album on an official CD print. But while I was living in Chicago, I struggled hard to find a good job so I didn’t have the money to order the CD’s. After I moved back to Indy and got a good job, I almost did it then even if it was a couple years later but I didn’t. Obviously CD’s are in rare demand these days, mostly for collectors, so I just knew it would be a waste of money. But man, it would have been cool to have that as a memento of it.
In the same year of Summer Rain’s release in 2016, I also took a Christmas song I originally wrote in high school called “I’ll Have Your Heart” and re-made it and released it in December as well. It was fun to go back to it, even though I wrote for a specific person back then, it’s a fun, cheesy song and good for the holiday season. I still share it every Christmas on the socials.
Post-album era
After I moved back home from Chicago, I hit a long writer’s block era. I had a couple song ideas I’d worked on here and there but nothing I was proud enough to finish and release. I had older songs I wanted to revisit but just never could get the motivation to. I even tried making acoustic versions of Summer Rain songs, but those didn’t find much purpose either. It wasn’t until I faced another heartbreak that I got the inspiration for a new song, and even that song didn’t come to me until years after the grieving process was over. However, the song was about how the process isn’t ever truly over, it sticks with you, haunts you. It took me over a year to write the song Haunted from start to release, but I’m glad I took my time with it because it ended up being my favorite song I’ve ever written and released so far. It’s dark and gritty, and I took a lot of time with the production on it.
After Haunted, I had plans to keep writing more. I had a couple songs started but this was when I had also started the podcast Among the Noise, which took a lot of my time, and then shortly after that I lived with my parents temporarily for a year which caused all of my recording-related projects to come to a halt during that time, mostly. Even by the time I moved into my own place again in 2024, I was struggling to find time and motivation for music because I had started a second podcast, Galaxy Bound. It’s hard having so many hobbies, with only so much time and brain power to give them. Since I was making no progress, I was listening to the entire Summer Rain album one day and when I’m Left Here Sinking came on, I remembered how much I loved it but there were some elements I wish I had done differently. I also thought it deserved to be given the single treatment and released on its own. So I ventured back into the project file and did a few touch ups and recorded some additional guitars and re-mastered the whole thing and re-released it in 2025. It was a fun experience, and got me back into Logic and warmed me up for working on actual new things.
In the fall of 2025, I was faced with another relationship catastrophe. This one was different, it was a situation I never thought I’d face, nor do I wish it on my worst enemy. As of writing this, I’m still processing it all even months later, but I used all of this to at least one benefit: the music. I wrote and finished Losing Ground in a matter of two weeks, which was the fastest I’ve ever finished a song from start to release. I just poured all of my attention into it, attention I needed to get away from focusing on the absolute shit show of my love life. Losing Ground is about the entire situation, with a bit of a positive spin at the end, which I wrote before I learned more of the truth of the situation, ironically. I think the song still fits the situation in hindsight, but I almost took down the song because for a short time I didn’t want there to be a positive spin on it at all. I decided to leave it up, and I’m glad I did. The song is not a historic retelling, it is its own thing. And even though I am still hurt, confused, and frustrated with the situation and will be for quite some time, I do still wish everyone involved the best and happiness and want to remain as positive as possible about it all as time goes on.
That brings us to now. What’s next? I’ve said this in previous blogs, I fully intended Haunted to be the first single for a whole album. I want to continue to work towards that goal. I’m just not sure it will be attainable or necessary. But who knows. I still have a handful of songs in-progress, so we’ll see which one comes next. Hopefully it will be soon!
If you missed the links sprinkled throughout this post, here’s your last reminder to check out Grey Harbor on all music streaming platforms. Here’s a link to Losing Ground to get you started:
https://greyharbor.io/losing-ground
If you'd like to go back in time and listen to all of my musical creations in one place, here is a Google Drive folder of them all.