BIO:
"I'm the revolution," wails Ian Erix on the emotionally charged anthem entitled "For Conformity." "I'm chaos and confusion. Your problem, your solution," Erix declares in song. "No product of a nation or overnight sensation," he quips in witty reference to the trials and tribulations he has encountered along his journey.
Born and bred on New York's suburban Long Island, Ian got his start in the music scene as a DJ/MC at the age of nine. Yes, nine! There, he nurtured his musical skills and counts the time he spent playing music and performing daily in front of the crowds as priceless training ground. But after having spent most of his early teen years on the DJ circuit and having hosted thousands of private parties, Ian was ready to move on. "It was a big struggle for me," Erix says. "By that point I had been writing my own music for a while and I really wanted to break into the business but I had no contacts whatsoever in the recording industry except for this one producer dude that came to talk to me after he saw me MC a party. He kept pushing me to join one of his groups, a boyband, but they wanted to dress me and shape me and have me sing other peoples songs and I was really not down with that. People thought I was stupid for not just going along with it at the time but I was totally determined to do things my way even though I didn’t really have a leg to stand on.”
“It wasn’t easy” Ian reflects. “I had to bang down a lot of doors and figure out some kind of way to build up my own network of connections from scratch. Everybody in my life pretty much told me that I would never succeed and I should concentrate on school and stop dreaming but I wasn’t gonna listen to that nonsense. I made some headway eventually and I got myself signed to a hugely successful management company in Orlando, Florida. I was stoked cause I thought they were gonna help me get my music out to the world and they promised me that I would be able to keep creative control. It ended up being a really sucky situation though.” They too wanted to place Ian in a boyband and when he wouldn’t fit into there cookie cutter mold they just wasted his time until his contract ran out.
“After that”, Erix reveals, "I had a lot of negativity in my life and people were really coming down on me hard and in a hurtful way. They thought I should give it up, go back to school or get a “normal” job. But there was no way in hell that was gonna happen!" Armed with not much more than blind ambition, Ian headed overseas to “bang down some more doors." After some time, he met Goran Lykke, a promoter from The Netherlands, who saw his potential as a solo star and booked him as a presenter on the PopStop Tour, which took him to over 40 cities in 15 countries across Europe. He also appeared at The World Music Awards in Monaco.
During one of the tour stops in Germany, Ian was approached by two TV executives who were enticed by his unique style and the overwhelming reaction by fans to his first appearances in Deutschland. They offered him the starring role in a reality television series which would document the life of an up and coming American rock star making his way through the European music scene. “It was a dream come true” remembers Erix. “I signed a deal that allowed me to record my own tunes, be my own person and launch my music through a major European record label!”
Things had finally begun to fall into place and a few months later, Ian arrived in London to begin filming only to have the rug pulled out from under him upon his arrival. A legal battle had ensued between the two television executives, a network deadline had been missed and the future of the TV series was now up in the air. Distraught, Ian was left on his own in the UK with no resolution to the legal issues in sight. Instead of flying back home to New York with his tail between his legs, Erix spent a week pounding the pavement in London determined to somehow make the most out of a bad situation. He convinced a representative from an international music publishing company to take a short meeting with him and after they met she suggested he fly to Scandinavia to meet with music producers on her roster who might be willing to record the music he had written.
Money was tight but Ian figured out he could cash in his first class plane ticket which was provided by the now embattled TV series and get just enough to fly coach class to Sweden and then onto Denmark and back to the USA. He did just that and met with several Scandinavian producers but had yet to find a good match. However, in a small city outside of Copenhagen, Denmark, he visited Danish producer, Dan Zak. They hit it off instantly and began recording some material. “After I got home from that trip” Ian says “I was really stoked about my new music but I was totally freaked out about what had happened otherwise. I was smack in the middle of a big legal mess overseas and I didn’t know what the hell to do. It wasn’t like I could afford to hire a team of lawyers or anything so I waited it out a while but when there was no end in sight, I opted out.”
Over the course of that year, Ian used creative means to return to Denmark several times and continued writing and recording. The city of Elsinore which was once made famous by William Shakespeare as the inspiration for "Hamlet" served as Ian's temporary home through the creative process. The result was extraordinary. An eclectic mix of pop-punk, rock and powerpop elements came together to create a sound that was distinctively, Ian Erix. Each song was chocked full of contagious melodies, intriguing lyrics and raw energy. After completing enough songs for an album and having learned of the difficulties Ian faced with his now defunct TV series, producer Dan Zak signed Ian to the Scandinavian label, I.D. Records, where he pulls double duty as A&R.
Things were back up and running and 2005-2006 saw the onslaught of promo trips for Erix to such places as South East Asia, Japan and South Africa where Ian released his debut singles. With support internationally from powerhouses such as MTV, who added the video for "Confessions Of A Killer" to their rotations, Ian scored his first Top 10 hit abroad. Hit singles and videos followed in the form of “For Conformity” and “Magdalen” and Ian found Top 10 success again in parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Then, with the launch of his MySpace page, Erix discovered a platform to reach out directly to his audience and connect with new listeners in parts of the globe who had not yet been introduced to his music. It wasn’t long until he was topping the online charts in his genre and amassing thousands of friends and millions of song plays. “I love the social network sites” says Erix “it’s such an awesome way to put myself out there and so rad to be able to talk directly to people from all over the planet who are digging my music”. It occurred to Ian that it would be great to somehow meet a few of his online fans in person and it was this passing notion that sparked the birth of “Journey Of A Rock Star”. Through a label rep, Ian got word that a European television production company was interested in shooting a TV show involving travel and they were looking for a host. Erix convinced them to take a meeting with him but surprised the producers when he explained that he wasn’t interested in the format of the show they had presented. Instead, he pitched his own idea which involved creating an interactive contest on social networking websites, traveling to every continent around the world to meet his online friends and spending a day with them in their lives. The producers loved it and “Journey Of A Rock Star” was born.
Shortly thereafter, Ian put out a simple bulletin asking his online friends if they wanted to be “Considered For The Journey”. News of the contest spread like wildfire and thousands of entrants put themselves into the running. The TV series was sold to a syndicator and filming of the first tier began. “It was the sickest adventure” Ian boasts “I went to a ton of dope places and met some awesome peeps”. A mini pilot/promotional clip for “Journey Of A Rock Star” was soon released online and that added fuel to the fire garnering well over a million views and reaching 1 on the MySpace TV charts. With such a phenomenal response, another trip around the world was planned for Ian and a second contest was initiated to find a new batch of finalists for Ian to visit. At that point, Bill Hastings, the executive producer and financier of the TV series took on a management role for Ian and they finally began planning his much anticipated music launch in his homeland of America. Little did Ian know that tragedy loomed on the horizon.
Just as Erix was gearing up for his big US launch, he received a phone call informing him that Bill Hastings had died of a drug overdose in Europe. The news came as a terrible shock to Ian and the entire future of his project was thrown into jeopardy. “Everything began to fall apart for me all over again at that point. I felt awful for Bill and his family and I was crazy disappointed that he did that to himself. I didn’t have any clue that he had any issues with drugs so I was totally caught off guard by the whole thing. And selfishly, I couldn’t help but be freaked out about what was gonna happen with all the stuff I had been working on for so long. Pretty much, everything was stalled in it’s tracks. Bill’s assets were seized, the production company was closed down, my launch was canceled and I was totally screwed! My overseas label was seriously over budget at the time so they couldn’t step in to help pick up the pieces. It was a huge setback.”
Not the type to just roll over and be defeated, Erix sprang back into action almost immediately and managed to obtain the rights to continue producing the TV series on his own. He hit the ground running, regrouped with new management and partnered up with an established US production company to pick things up where he had left off. With scores of online fans clamoring for more music, Ian also went back to work crafting some new tunes. With his songs having been played over 10 million times on MySpace thus far and having recently charted at 1 on the Bebo Music Charts, Ian's new material is eagerly anticipated as is the small screen debut of “Journey Of A Rock Star”. The series is currently set to hit TV screens in 2009 and his new album is expected to drop in '09 as well. When asked about his current musical sound and distinctive take on fashion, Ian says, “I don’t know, some people call it pop-punk, or emo or scene. They’ve got all kinds of labels for me but I’m just me. I’m a mutt, all mixed up!!!”. And it’s those very words he sings on his latest single “So Scene, So See Through (A Song For Mutts)”. And just like a dog with a bone”, Ian Erix jokes, I won’t ever give it up!”
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