Being an Ohio State graduate, I almost have to not like the CD!
My sister went to Ohio State, and my Dad went to Penn State so we had a very conflicted house.

You have a great way of writing about personal experiences but doing it in a general way that allows the listener to add their own point of view. Was it hard to write personally?

I mean yeah, you have to get to a point where your comfortable with what your saying and I have other songs that I can go further with that but for the most part I like to keep it pretty general. None of the songs are really speaking of anything specific, they're more just speaking of situations that had either happened to me or people that I know or that can just happen. I don't like to get too specific and personal with things that I've gone through because while I'm listening to lyrics, I like to be able to put my own experience on it rather than them tell me what happened to them. So, for the most part they're persona,l but they're not overly personal that it makes me feel uncomfortable telling people anything like this.

Because you write or everyday experiences, you have had to have fans, especially girls and women, come up and tell you how your song has touched them.
I've had people tell me that song meant a lot to them or I've been through that and stuff like that, but that’s what the whole point is. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me then I'll always be writing to do something right.

You are now touring live with the songs. Do you feel yourself becoming more of a performer as well as a writer?
Definitely. With every show you challenge yourself more. I like to play around with melodies every once in a while and make things a little more interesting for me and Eddie ,the guitar player I've been playing with. And ya know, it's just fun. It's like anything, the more you do it the better you get and the more confident you get.

You have had very mixed reviews in the press, do you pay attention to those?
You pay attention to a point, I'm not going to lie and say I don't read any of it. But I try to, obviously if people see one that was really cool then I'll go find it. But you know, it's like I already did my job and people can say whatever they want, but I'm really happy with it and I'm not really concerned with it. If it's doing well and people are enjoying it and still coming to shows then that's all that I care about.

Is it weird to turn on the radio and hear yourself singing?
It's definitely weird. It's definitely surreal experience, to the point where I felt like I was kinda fooling myself. Like maybe I put in the song in the cd player and then popped it out in time for the DJ to get back on and start talking. But it doesn't really feel real, I guess. I really don't listen to the radio that much because in New York, it's kinda hard to listen to the radio if you don't have a car or a job.

I am a big dork and when I get a photo published or write something for a magazine, I run and buy like five copies. Did you go to the record store and buy your CD?
Yeah, I did. When it first came out my producer and I went to a store and bought it in the morning and then that day I was on Conan O'Brien, so that night a bunch of my friends that came to the show and my family, it was probably about 40 of u,s went to another store and we all basically bought them out. Luckily they had enough because it was a store right by my label so I think they were pretty stocked up.

That store probably thought you were the hottest ticket out there!
You know, it's funny because somebody came over to me and said do you know how many that store sold, they sold so many and I was like, "Oh (laughing), that was me."

You have been touring a lot around the Midwest where you probably have a lot of family and friends. Does that make the transition to life on the road any easier?
I mean, yeah, ya know, I mean it helps living in New York because that's where my label and my management and everybody that I work with are located. But you know, I went to school in Wisconsin so a lot of my friends are from the Midwest. When I go out to Chicago, there's a lot of people that I know there so, it's nice to be able to go around and see everybody. It's always nice to go home, that's for sure.

Now that you are experiencing a whole new lifestyle and traveling across the country, do you think those experiences will influence your writing?
You just want to try everything, there's no like limit to, I don't really pay attention to exactly what inspired me at the moment but subconsciously it seemed like a lot of things would just come out while I was writing, a lot of the songs have a lot of different flavors in them from a lot of different kind of music that I like to listen to so, for the most part, it's that kind of a thing, it's just not paid attention to from me.

A lot of artists first records are kind of a hodgepodge of their influences being but on tapre. Do you think this CD is that or do you think you really found your own voice?
I think for the most part, I really found it. Obviously your first record, you want it to be right and you want everybody to be happy and it's really hard to please everybody but I pretty much stuck to my guns on a lot of things. Obviously you have disagreements with the people your working with, but I'm getting more of a grip on what kind of stuff I like. But for this first album, I'm really proud of it and I'm really proud that I got my first album completed. And the second album, if I get a chance to do one, will hopefully represent me a little bit more.

Did you have all your material written when going in the studio or did you write a lot once you started recording and felt that vibe?
I mean it was basically just like an ongoing process. I had a lot of ideas going into it and if those ideas could change, there really wasn't any formula to it. I had a lot of the songs already written and we just went it and started from the beginning.

Do you have a favorite track?
There's a lot of stuff that goes on in the song "Coming Back In", that I'm really happy with. It still kinda makes me feel like, "Aw, that's really cool." And I really thankful for the song "The River." But I guess the song "Everyday" is my kind of breath of fresh air on the album because it's very cut down to the root of the song and it stays pretty subtle and I really like that.

You are touring right now pretty much acoustic. Was that an easy transition to make from the record which is obviously a full band?
It was really easy actually, I mean all the songs I wrote were written on acoustic guitar so it really wasn’t that difficult to scale it down. It was just a matter of convincing people that even though it is a different thing, it's still the same thing, do you know what I mean?

Lastly, you are in a lobby talking on a cell phone with me. Did you think this music business was so much hard work?
Aw, dude, you never know what your getting into it until you do it. I hate when people say, "You know what you were going to get into. You knew this was gonna happen." And you don't know. I'm recording the album and that was all I was concentrating on and I was kind of bored for a couple of months waiting to hear what we were going to do and what the plan was. And now it's like crazy. So now, you just gotta roll with it. But I didn't think that I was going to have to interviews like this on the phone, talking about the album, while I’m like in the lobby of the record company.