So here I am going off on this huge tangent about life's trials and tribulations, and I haven't even introduced myself yet. My apologies... Ok, my name is Grant Elliot and I am the lead singer of the band "Fact & Fiction." I am from a small town just outside of Oklahoma City, OK called Edmond. Like many, many, many other musicians, I took to music at a very early age, thanks to the likes of a Mr. Garth Brooks. I believe I was nine, maybe ten, wait... no I was definitely nine, when I saw Garth performing on the TV at the Grammy's. And I knew it right then. I didn't want to be a fireman; I didn't want to be a bank robber; I wanted to do what he was doin'. I wanted to be a performer! I turned to my Mom and that's exactly what I told her, and, to this day, my dreams have not changed one bit. Now has life thrown me some curveballs? Absolutely, but my philosophy has always been to let those curveballs keep comin' and wait for that one perfect fastball right up the middle, then knock it out of the park. Now where were we? You're gonna have to excuse me, my mind just sorta takes off on these little spurts and I stray completely away from the story that I'm tryin' to tell here. Oh yeah, how I got into music... to make a long story short, my musical journey began on that Garth night and I played in band after band and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. Songwriting is where I found my knack, my inner voice that let me release all of my emotion, whether it be joy or pain, into these fragments of time called songs. Songs are the purest form of language that we have. A great song can breach the boundaries of language and culture; A great song moves you, and sometimes you can't explain why, but it moves you. The pursuit of that great song is what led me Los Angeles, the music mecca of the world.
Now, you may or may not have heard this before, but I'm gonna tell you that L.A. is NOT the place to find yourself as a person. Hollywood has rarely been nice to strangers and if you don't know EXACTLY what you've brought yourself out here to do, please think twice about the move. Now, on the other hand, L.A. is a beautiful place. The resources in this town are next to none. The cultural diversities are endless, the stories are endless... basically it's a songwriter's dream. See, here I go again! I'm tryin' to tell our story from start to finish and my mind just takes off again. Deep breath... Alright, so I made the move to L.A. just after my sophmore year of college at Arizona State University... so lets just say a year and a half ago. I enjoyed college and I learned quite a bit (mostly about myself), but I never felt like I belonged there. It took my roommate and long time friend to eventually give me that harsh punch in the gut so that I could wake up and smell the roses. Needless to say, a month later I packed up my car and headed west. Now, L.A. is like a dream at first,ok. The first few months that you're here, you keep pinchin' yourself tryin' to figure out if this is real or not. I mean, it's so vast you don't even know where to start. As a musician, I knew that I had to find the real players, the cats that were makin' things happen. There's this really great website that everyone uses out here called "Craigslist," which is basically a networking forum and a lot of musicians use this site to hook up with other players. So I bounced around on there for a while and played with a ton of guys, but nothin' really ever seemed to stick, you know. There was never that chemistry, that deep connection that we musicians all long for. It's in those moments that really great music is born. I have my stubborn nature to thank for not givin' up my search, and boy am I glad I didn't, because my life was about to take a drastic change of course...
