LouFest 2014: Marc Sciblia
What’s your ideal concert?“I like concerts when the band is almost airborne, and it feel so much bigger than just three or four guys playing music.”
Every time Marc Scibilia plays a show, produces new music or goes on tour, he is just grateful that that means he still doesn’t have to get a real job.
Because where Scibilia comes from in New York, a “real job” meant working in an office nine hours a day, five days a week. So, in that line of rationality, Scibilia has never worked a day in his life.
It’s some wonder, then, why the 28-year-old has had a #1 hit on the iTunes Singer/Songwriter chart, was given the chance to perform on the MTV Music Awards and has a featured session on Spotify.
He’d like to think his music is the hypothetical baby of Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson. Which, deciphered into reality, means that his sound is reminiscent of folksy Americana singer/songwriter collaborations that you can dance to.
The dancing part is something Scibilia has been trying to embrace in order to give his audiences a more varied and energized experience. But, really, he’s the deep and brooding type, stoically artistic and never comfortable in dancing form.
He prefers the lyrically intricate and the verbally poignant part of music. That’s part of the reason Scibilia fell into the Americana genre. Most of the time, he says, music can serve to make the lyrics suffer. But, in his opinion, Americana as a species has worked on preserving the delicacy of lyrical harmony.
Scibilia doesn’t have a specific invigorating creative process for making the lyrics inside him come to fruition. “I just kind of let the music and the moment take me,” Scibilia says. “It’s more about why the song is coming to life and what makes the song true than specific process.”
Talking to Scibilia, it would appear as though he’s got it all figured out.
He knows that taking his pit-bull lab mix, Lander, on the road with him reduces stress—even when the dog eats every single thing on the tour bus, such as a bottle of Mucinex or an entire 16 oz. bag of chocolate-covered pretzels.
He knows that most successful artists have to have “a little bit of stupid in them” to undoubtedly hear “no” and that they aren’t good enough about a zillion times.
He also knows to stick to his own convictions anyway because that’s all that matters.
But even this Nashville star says he still has some work to do. “When you’re just starting out, I think it’s common to believe that at a certain point, it won’t be so hard,” Scibilia says. “But that couldn’t be further from the truth. You constantly have to fight for your existence.”
It’s like when Scibilia wakes up at 3 a.m. in a tiny hotel room, just scraping by, and a song is pounding in his mind, and he has to get it down. So he doesn’t go to sleep. He stays up in the bathroom and writes, and later, when he hears “How Bad We Need Each Other” on the hit T.V. show Bones, he thinks about that moment. “I could’ve slept right through that song,” Scibilia says. “But I didn’t, I never did, and now look at what’s happened.”
