An Interview with music artist Ross Victory

BIOGRAPHY:

Music is refuge. Music is shelter. Music has been a safe place and will always be the sanctuary that songwriter, singer, and author Ross Victory seeks. By age two, as a giggly yet purposeful toddler, Ross had mastered the Happy Birthday song and was overtaking his family’s pots and pans, clanking them together to form melodies. By age seven, he had begun to record himself with a tape recorder to create original tunes for his grandmother and 1st grade teacher — personalized lullabies that ranged thematically from stargazing to the indisputable greatness of homemade spaghetti.

As a teen, Ross began to write chants for school mixers and soon started receiving requests for song topics from teachers and students.

After purchasing his first electric piano and experimenting with music production software, Ross quickly accumulated a thick notebook of songs that ranged from deep existential longing and love to expressions of spiritualism and gang violence.

Having grown up on the smooth soul of the 1990s — Jon B., Babyface, Donell Jones and Toni Braxton, among others — Ross began to refine his sound, which critics have described as “the perfect balance of sincerity and sensuality,” “never lacking soul or passion while being tonally smooth,” and written by someone who “believes what he writes.”

When Ross graduated from college, he walked away from his songwriting aspirations to opt for the monotony of corporate America. But he immediately felt the consequences of not creating and the subsequent negative impact on his mental health and interpersonal relationships. Still, for years he chose professional progress over self-expression and personal development, which resulted in misclassified anxiety and misaligned priorities.

After the loss of his father and brother, Ross finds himself pushed to share his music again, understanding the true importance of never leaving music behind again. This time, Ross steps out ambitiously with a new single called Savor the View. Savor the View is the sonic extension of his new memoir, Views from the Cockpit: The Journey of a Son, which explores the loss of his father through comparative analysis of airplane journeys and life journeys. With a pen and paper in hand, healing is always possible no matter the weather conditions of our lives. Self-expression be it in music or written form is Step 1.