FEATURED MUSICIAN ZEPH ALLEN
PRESENTING FEATURED MUSICIAN ZEPH ALLEN
In early summer of 1999, having just graduated from Key West High School, a seventeen year old Zeph Allen prepared for a trip to Europe in the fall. He packed too many clothes and his guitar. He was determined to bring along the guitar and play in the streets of Europe. He didn’t really have any finished songs or even any guitar chops. He could strum a few chords and had a few choruses.
Cut ahead a few months to his arrival in Munich, Germany: The guitar lays twisted and broken in its case, a casualty of international flight. It would take the entire six weeks of his trip to get that guitar fixed.
It turns out that working on Duval Street at Ben & Jerry’s after his trip to Europe wasn’t what motivated him to write songs. Neither were the two years of college in Durham, NH. It wasn’t until he had returned to Key West once more that he started to realize that he had trouble focusing on his supposed art. If Key West was too familiar or too expensive to invest the time he needed in his craft, then he would go elsewhere. It was time to start a band and write songs; he was 24.
Elsewhere happened to be in the middle of the Appalachian mountains: Floyd, VA to be exact. About as far, culturally, from Key West as one can get. Bluegrass and county; southerners and winter. Zeph’s cousin Janiah was a drummer and rented a house on the cheap. Cheap rent, big country, no neighbors for a mile. Plenty of time and space to get things moving. And they did. Two bands and two cd’s in five years, tours and festivals around the southeast, up into New England and over into the Ohio Valley. And most fun of all, the annual Key West Christmas tour with Alliens: a conch born ensemble of second generation musicians; the sons of The Survivors.
Times with the band were good and bad, hot and cold. The members clashed artistically and a few years in, the songwriting ground to a halt. Zeph had songs, but they didn’t fit with the band’s sound. When new ideas came to him, they generally were not related to the “party” band sound that the Alliens favored. When he tried to fit them into the context of the group, he invariably felt that the songs became compromised and lost the artistry that was intended at their inception.
Fall 2011: Zeph realized it was time to write some new tunes and make an album on his own. Through the winter and spring of 2012 he wrote songs and revised them. In June of 2012 he started recording tracks for the album. It would end up being call “Define Believe.” Released at the end of March 2013, the 11 songs are a showcase of songwriting; an eceentric tasteful mix of heartfelt expression and whimsy. Listen: because sooner is better than later, and the present is now.
Shot in a couple of days in Key West and Big Sur, “I Get Along” is Zeph’s official music video. Thanks Ian Q. Rowan for directing and Quincy Perkins at White Orchid Studios for edit, color, and camera.
Define Believe
Recorded in the summer and fall of 2012, Define Believe is Zeph’s first album as sole songwriter/producer. The eleven tracks are a cohesive unit as much as they are a songwriter’s showcase, ranging from mellow acoustic tunes to all-out rockin’ celebrations of music, life, and freedom.
Engineered and Mixed by Jake Dempsey @ The Music Lab in Roanoke, VA and Mastered by Garrett Haines @ Treelady Studios in Pittsburgh, PA, and featuring an all star cast of musicians from the Southwest VA area, Define Believe is a testament to what is possible within the realm of truly independent music. Born of necessity, grown of experience and matured through tenacity, the album was released independently at the end of March, 2013.