Life & Work with Marco Apicella

Today we’d like to introduce you to Marco Apicella.

Hi Marco, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I have been fascinated by the piano since I can remember. Nobody in my family was really a musician, but I had one cousin who played the piano and I remember loving listening to him play and looking at his hands fly on the keyboard. Finally at age ten, I decided that I wanted to take lessons so I researched some local music schools and asked my mom to take me there. I was lucky enough to find a very good teacher who was passionate and kind, so I started taking lessons and enjoyed learning from her very much. She only taught classical piano, which I loved, but I somehow always knew I didn’t have the discipline to become a concert pianist. I was more interested in learning jazz and improvisation, even though at the time I didn’t really know what that was. I was just intrigued by the idea of being able to sit at the piano and make music spontaneously. Unfortunately, there were no jazz teachers in the small Italian town I grew up with, so the path to improvisation took a few unexpected turns.

It all started when I met my best friend in middle school. He had just started playing guitar and offered to teach me the basic chords on the piano so that we could play some songs together. We first played Italian pop songs, then discovered classic rock, which naturally evolved in progressive rock and heavy metal. I discovered the world of keyboards and synthesizers and loved it. By age 16, we were playing in bands performing in small venues and festivals around. At the same time, I kept studying classical piano and planned to apply to the Rome conservatory as soon as I finished high school. Meanwhile, my friend had found a contemporary music school also in Rome and convinced me that we had to check that out. When I finished high school and had to decide between applying for Med school or continue studying music I decided to follow my passion.

At that time, it had become clear to me that I wanted to pursue jazz full-time rather than keep devoting so much energy to classical piano. Reluctantly, I dropped out of Rome’s conservatory despite all the years and hard work I had put into being admitted and dedicated myself to the study of jazz and contemporary music. But it even though Rome probably has the best music scene in Italy, I felt like it wasn’t enough. I researched the best music schools in Europe and found out that Holland had some great options and was kind of “the hub” for European jazz. I applied to the famous Amsterdam Conservatory and… got rejected. For a whole year after that episode, I practiced so hard and when the day of the audition the year after arrived I was ready. This time I had applied to multiple conservatories in Holland and ended up being accepted in a few different schools. So I moved to Rotterdam and started my new life as a jazz pianist.

The experience of living by myself in a city was amazing in and of itself. The music scene was vibrant and there were concerts and jam sessions every night. I started meeting musicians from all over Europe and the world and playing with them. Four years flew by, I graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s in jazz piano and more importantly shared the stage with some of the best musicians in the nation. I even had a chance to perform together with world renowned artists such as Marcus Miller, Snarky Puppy and Brian Fowler. As great an experience that was, I wanted more. I was in love and played a genre of music that had originated in the USA, so I knew that if I really wanted to get to the next level, I had to go there. So again, I got on the internet and researched the best music schools in the US. I knew I needed to go to a place with good weather because after four years in Holland, I was losing my mind. All jokes aside when I found out that Russell Ferrante, pianist for the band Yellowjackets and personal idol of mine, taught at USC I knew where I wanted to go. Surprisingly enough and against all odds. I got accepted to study a master or music in jazz studies at USC so I packed my suitcase and moved to Los Angeles.

LA is not an easy city and it took me some time to get acquainted with the environment but after a few weeks (maybe months) everything started to fall in place. The school was great, I got to study with incredible musicians who turned out to be also amazing human beings. Through the school’s network, I started meeting more and more musicians and got to play a few gigs here and there. By the time I had graduated a couple of years later, I was performing at some of the best venues in town and had a couple of job offers lined up as a music teacher in a community college and a local conservatory. Life was great, then COVID hit.

It was a really tough couple of years. No performances, very few occasions to be together with friends and people. But between a solitary walk around a deserted LA and teaching online students, I also had some free time, so I decided to get creative. I started composing solo piano music and at the same time, initiated some remote collaborations with friends around the world. I worked on projects for artists in Holland and in Italy while sitting in my home studio in LA. COVID opened my eyes to the possibility of working remotely as a composer and producer, and I discovered that I loved doing that.

Fast forward to 2022 and more than 1 million people have listened to my music on Spotify, I had worked as a producer for a dance show for one of the biggest cruise ship lines in the world and got signed by a German label to release some of my piano compositions. There is an Italian song that says: “nothing grows out of diamond, but flowers grow out of manure”. This is exactly what happened for me during the pandemic. I was forced to make the best of a very difficult situation, and the effort proved fruitful.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The hardest challenge for me is trying to keep being motivated and keep believing. It’s kind of a battle against myself. Imposter syndrome is very real for me, and it kicks in every time I start a new project. I start asking myself “will I be able to do it again? Do I have what it takes?”. And every time (so far) I demonstrate to myself that I actually can.

Another big challenge is to keep myself motivated and working towards a goal that, as a musician, I don’t really have. Of course on a surface level, there are professional goals such as working on better projects, composing music for a big movie, or reaching however many listeners around the world. But on a deeper level, music is so vast, so infinite, that every musician who’s humble enough to recognize it will tell you that there is no way they’ll ever be satisfied with their abilities. There will always be something else you need to work on, something new you want to learn, no matter how good and successful you are. And so we have to keep ourself motivated despite this which can sometimes be hard. The key in my opinion is to keep being curious and try to learn something new every day.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am very proud of a couple of projects I worked on lately. The first is my Lo-Fi project in collaboration with my friend MIXK. We started producing Lo-Fi beats a couple of years ago during the pandemic, and we didn’t really expect anything out of it. We were just doing it to challenge ourself to do something we had never done before and to use our creativity to make something people would actually enjoy listening to. There is a growing community of people who swear that listening to Lo-Fi beats while studying or working helps them focus more and do a better job. We were attracted by and loved the idea of enriching people’s lives with our music. In addition to that, we quickly understood we had great chemistry going on as we produced track after track almost effortlessly.

When we released our first beat, we didn’t expect anything from it. I remember looking at my Spotify for artist page and seeing my one song being released and feeling proud. “10 people listening right now, that’s cool”, I remember thinking. I went to bed and the next morning, I woke up to 20 messages from my friend and co-producer. Our song had been picked up by the biggest Lo-Fi playlist on Spotify. Our monthly listeners went from hundreds to hundreds of thousands in a matter of days. We knew we had something going on so we kept releasing tracks and somehow we kept being picked up by this huge playlist where millions of people were listening to our songs. It was truly an amazing feeling, and we know that this was only the start of an incredible collaboration.

Another project I loved working with is the show “Dreamscape”, a dance show that will be performed live by a cast of dancers, actors, singers and acrobats on a cruise ship in the Caribbean islands. I got to arrange and produce 10 songs in genres ranging from jazz to rock and everything in between. Having a lot of freedom, I had so much fun writing for strings, orchestra and big band. I curated every step of the creative process such as coming up with the ideas for the arrangements, the different musical styles and instrumentations, writing the charts, contracting musicians and organizing the recording sessions. It was truly an amazing experience and having to work on a deadline taught me a lot about what it means to work in this industry. This was my first big project and I’m proud of myself for completing it. Now I look forward to the next and I know that I’ll do it even better this time.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I think that in the coming years we will see more and more remote collaborations, and I believe that the use of virtual reality will be a game changer for the music business. I imagine people being able to set up remote recording sessions with multiple musicians interacting from all over the world and working in the same virtual environment and I am very excited for this. Many people think that technology is taking us apart. I think that technology will actually allow us to feel closer to each other even when we can’t physically be there for one another.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcoapicellakeys/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marco.apicella.121/
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/big-master-1
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5Nww6Nim8NzaAH97sRJxms?si=lR7of3pbRmm4QSYQ1DBFXw