Today we’d like to introduce you to Jerome Vivino.
Hi Jerome, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My story truly started about ten years back when I decided to drop out of University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business to pursue music. At that time, I had just found out that Berklee College of Music existed, so I transferred there and finished my bachelor’s degree studying guitar and music production.
Then I had a choice, follow my music school friends to cities oversaturated with ‘people trying to make it’ like LA or NYC, or give cities like Austin and Nashville a try. Well, after a three-day visit to Austin, the decision was made. To this day, I still have never made it to Nashville.
I moved to Austin 7 years ago and didn’t know anyone. All my family lives on the East Coast (Philadelphia), so I was on my own – and loving it! Ten months into my residence here, I met my first bandmates, with whom I was expecting to travel the world with performing our music.
We formed a band called LIP and were on the way to success – we were official SXSW artists in 2018, had played stages like the Mohawk, and were featured on Sun Radio’s Texas Radio Live program. Then, our luck turned for the worse – our house burnt down on July 1, 2018 and we lost our entire studio and lifetime accumulation of musical instruments. Thanks to a GoFundMe campaign that raised 19k in 3 weeks, we were able to construct a new studio and get back to playing live shows less than a month later! All was going well, we even got signed to a radio promotion deal that would spread our new EP across the country. Unfortunately, two weeks into the campaign, our radio promoter tragically died of a heart attack, and the hundreds of CDs we had sent out with his contact information proved to be a less successful effort than we had hoped for. A few months later, due to increasing tension caused by differences in band members’ personalities and ambitions, we split up as a band.
A few months after our breakup, I still decided to move into the former band house (which had our rebuilt rehearsal space and studio) in place of one of the disgruntled band members. That member and I attempted to revamp LIP, but the magic just wasn’t there. So I turned to another former LIP member, and we formed another entirely new project called Upper Level Lows.
After rehearsing for about a year, Upper Level Lows recorded our first EP during the pandemic. At the time, I was working a day job at a veterinary clinic that had become increasingly insufferable. When my bandmates started to notice that the stress had seeped into my guitar playing, I knew I had to get out of there. I ended up finding a new job in customer support at an emerging tech startup, which let me work from home in the middle of our band studio. Being surrounded by instruments all day but not being able to play them, coupled with the stress of dealing with people’s accounting and title insurance issues which I cared nothing about, made me even more miserable.
So I was faced with another tough decision ten years after leaving business school. I had moved to Austin to pursue my career in music, and these jobs were making it increasingly hard to pursue my passion even though they were still keeping the lights on. But yet again, my heart made the decision for me, and I owed it to myself this time. I finally dove headfirst into full-time music by quitting my job and taking matters into my own hands.
I immediately went to work, pursuing my own music for really the first time since moving here. With LIP and Upper Level Lows, I took a backseat in terms of songwriting to fully focus on being the best lead guitar player I could be. But now, it was finally time to pursue my own vision for myself musically.
Unlike my previous bands, which created beautifully deep, dark rock n’roll, my own sound is very different. Those who know me know how happy-go-lucky I am, and I wanted to reflect that in my music. I started a solo project during the pandemic, and with my friends from Berklee who lived across the country, I embarked on making happy music.
The new project, called Space Trayn, is my musical baby. The material is a collection of new songs I wrote during the pandemic, old ones spanning from my high school through my college years, and songs I’m currently working on. I like to describe the music as jazz-funk mixed with classic rock. The songs are light-hearted, fun, and easily digestible.
Over the past year, I have recorded an initial collection of 10 Space Trayn tunes with my Berklee friends Jack and Mike, who are in a band based out of Asheville, NC, called Slow Packer. I used my home studio to record my guitar parts and vocals and then would send them the project files so that they could lay down bass and drum tracks for each song in their studio in Asheville. Next, they would send the files back, and I would re-record all of my parts to fit more organically with the rhythm section. It was a very interesting experience working with collaborators across the country, and especially because I gave them free-reign over their parts and had no idea what they would come up with. Needless to say, my trust in them paid off, and I fell in love with their contributions. After getting the songs mixed and mastered, I released a first single and the next four songs as the Not So Fast EP. I went with that title because the first batch of songs turned out way slower and chiller than I had anticipated.
For the next five songs, the vibe is way closer to the fast-paced, funky, groovy fun of the first single “All Aboard”. The second unreleased EP will be called “To the Moon” and will feature songs that are dear to my heart and hopefully very fun for the listener. Recently, Space Trayn has started playing live shows with me as the frontman/lead singer/lead guitarist alongside a drummer, bassist, and rhythm guitar player who I’ve met here in Austin. I am very excited for the future and to create new music with the band I have formed here.
After taking a bit of a lull after releasing our EP, Upper Level Lows is now back with a vengeance! We are working on some new, very gritty rock songs and hope to be performing regularly by mid-Summer. I am stoked to now have two very different musical outlets to express myself through – one dark and gritty and the other light and airy. I can’t wait to see which one takes off first! Regardless, I feel so much happier and more fulfilled to be fully invested in my passion of making music.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
See bio for more specifics on struggles: moved here without knowing anyone, band house burnt down and lost all musical instruments, radio promoter died right after starting campaign, band member tensions breaking up a band we had spent five years developing, basically starting from square one with each of my two newer projects.
The biggest overall challenge has been, “do I follow my heart” or continue to do what society tells me (get a normal job, focus on making a living versus truly pursuing your passion). Luckily, after ten years of growing resentment for not pursuing my passion, my heart just took over and made the decision for me and I haven’t looked back.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am first and foremost an electric guitar player. I am known for shredding and writing cool guitar solos that ‘tell stories’. I specialize in rock guitar for most of my bands but have a soul/jazz/funk sound that truly comes out in my project Space Trayn. I am most proud musically of Space Trayn because it’s the first project that I truly get to be the lead contributor to the songwriting, sound, and vision/direction for the band. I write the music, words, and all guitar parts for each song; they are my musical babies. What I’d like to showcase with Space Trayn is my ability to write happy music as well as my ability to improvise guitar solos – and shred epic ones live.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
It seems like LIP was plagued with bad luck (house fire, promoter dying), but we never let it get in our way (of course, until we broke up). ‘Bad luck’ just provided one more of the many hurdles we had to climb in order to achieve our dreams of being full-time musicians.
At this point, I don’t know if I really believe in ‘good luck’. For me, if you are putting the work in, have passion towards that work, and have a general sense of what you’d like to strive for, ‘good luck’ will be earned more so than it just happening to you.
Looking back, the only bit of good luck I have received came with some pretty bad luck as well. My grandmother died, but in her will she left an inheritance that afforded me the ability to quit my job last year and still be able to pay rent for a few months. The inheritance came at the perfect time, just when my heart had decided enough was enough when it came to sh*tty day jobs that weren’t music.
Contact Info:
- Email: SpaceTrayn@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SpaceTrayn/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spacetrayn/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lkuvq49lMWenVSnrapoJACZHhxqIBy4b0
- Other: https://linktr.ee/spacetrayn
Image Credits
4 Photos of me in blue hat/in the pool: @brittanyNOFOMO 2 Pics with red hat: Dharam Khalsa @fullmoonsunrise_ 1 Pic riding panda: Robert Hein @lowkeythelowlife
