For Royce DeZorzi, music is alive and bursting with emotion and music shows that life best in live performances and live recordings.

DENVER. Colo. — For Royce DeZorzi, music is alive and bursting with emotion and music shows that life best in live performances and live recordings.

A self-taught guitarist and producer, DeZorzi’s music combines elements of folk and blues with extended guitar techniques and free improvisation and expression, and he shows it on his latest 14-track album “Denver.”

“I think all music in its purest form is alive, and I don’t think anything captures that breath of life better than naturally produced sound, whether acoustic or electric, but real sound, captured just microphones to tape in a room,” DeZorzi said. “I don’t think anything can beat that for me. This album achieved what I wanted in the sense that it's alive. It’s a breath of life, it’s likes a breath of air, like a drink of water, like a flower.”

DeZorzi loved music but as a kid he never thought he could play an instrument. Then his older brother, Alex bought a guitar and started playing with a band.

“I would just sit there and listen to him mesmerized and could not understand not only where it came from because of course we grew up together and he never seemed to have a musical talent,” DeZorzi said. “We both enjoyed music but it was always something that we never felt capable of stepping in and playing instruments so when he just did it when he was 19 I was just amazed. He’d sit me down and try to show me things on the guitar, things like the Boogy Woogy Blues riffs and I just couldn't grasp it.”

Then his brother passed away and left him his guitar. The instrument sat in DeZorzi’s closet for about a year before he decided to just sell it, but then something magical happened.

“My brother and my friend who was also friends with my brother, they played in a band together and I thought, I’m just going to let them have it because I'm not going to try and step in and embarrass myself,” DeZorzi said. “I took it to our friend and tried to sell it to him for $50 and he told me no. He wanted me to sit down and play and he started showing me some chords and things. All of a sudden it just clicked.”

DeZorzi worked on his new-found skill in private and moved from the family home in Georgia to rural Colorado where he took jobs on farms in the mountains. He worked on a farm and rented a dilapidated frame of a school bus from the farmer for $300 a month.

High in the mountains, with nothing but an old coal stove to keep him warm, he spent his free time teaching himself the guitar.

“I would work all the time and I would play my brother’s guitar in the evenings,” DeZorzi said. “And I would start learning things. At some point, John Fahey’s “Sunflower River Blues” made its way through the airwaves to my ears and I had never heard anything like that before. I freaked out, just the peace and the space and the freedom, I just started to think, listen to the orchestral possibilities of just the acoustic guitar and the natural beauty of just the strings ringing out to you.”

He started playing in coffee shops, brew pubs and barrooms in Western Colorado and received positive feedback about the sound he was developing. He moved to Denver and found that the city life took some getting used to.

“I didn’t actually dive into that finger-picking style for anything more than fun for several years because I gravitated toward playing the electric guitar,” DeZorzi said. “I didn’t want to be some old-timey bumpkin so I  started playing a Stratocaster and wanted to get into playing the funk and jazz fusion stuff. After a few years, I had actually stopped playing the guitar during the Coronavirus and was just focused on production with electronics.

“I’d pick up a guitar here and there and kind of default to the finger-picking stuff and friends would say, oh, what’s that? I really like that. I was like, you do? From there I realized every time I try the finger-picking acoustic stuff it feels so simple and natural and everyone I care about says, hey, that really sounds like you.”

DeZorzi’s new instrumental album, “Denver,” is an homage to that free-style acoustic sound that felt so right and comfortable.

It features 14 tracks, including the title track “Denver,” which is the only one played on DeZorzi’s brother’s old guitar.

“I was in an open state, I wasn't thinking, I was just tired and I just picked up that guitar and it flowed straight out onto the recording,” DeZorzi said. “I would not have played that on any other guitar, that was proof to me that that guitar has a soul and part of its identity was imbued by my brother’s love for the music that he showed through the guitar. In a sense I was asleep, I didn’t feel anything, I was just playing and it came right out.

“I looked up and I almost threw the computer audio file away, I didn't even know I had anything and then I was going back through recordings the next day or a week later and I was like, oh, what was that? I liked it and it went on the record and that’s how half the record came together at least. It's the most fun way to do it.”

DeZorzi said the titles of the tracks in “Denver” are reflective of the experiences and the feelings that came from the meditation he had while playing the songs.

“Even if it hurt or didn't feel right, I was determined to be honest about the experience that went into the song,” he said. “I guess maybe a lot of people don't think about it consciously but they know it when it hits them that an instrumental piece of music can carry just as much, if not more, emotion. A wordless piece of music can really take you on that journey and fill you with the emotions of the experience of the person who was there. But even more so fill you with the emotions of the experiences collectively of things that we all go through and serve as a soundtrack to our individual and collective moments of vulnerability.”

Following the release of Denver, DeZorzi plans to continuing sharing his music through live performances and experimentation into new styles and outlets. This artist has an incredible future ahead of him and it would truly be a mistake to miss out on the powerful work he has coming up.

Make sure to stay tuned in to Royce DeZorzi on various platforms for new music, visuals and social posts.

Websites:
Bandcamp
Spotify
YouTube
Apple Music
Iron Shackle
Linktr