Songs written between work orders.

Mark grew up in Upland, a small working-class town in Delaware County, PA — BMX bikes, traded baseball cards, quarter-waters, the ice cream truck, block-wide games of Manhunt until the streetlights came on. Summers meant dirt bikes through the woods along Chester Creek, and once, an abandoned rowboat he and his brother paddled downstream with garden shovels because nobody had oars. That's the soil the songs grew out of — small-town Pennsylvania before it was anything else.

Music started early, at Caruso's Music in Brookhaven, and it never really let go. In eighth grade, the family moved to Cape May, NJ, trading row-house streets for the Jersey shore, and it was there, as a teenager, that he first played in front of people — strumming out on the outdoor mall, working up the nerve one afternoon at a time. Chasing something bigger. Somewhere in the middle of running a phone company, and starting a marketplace, the songs started coming back — first quietly, on his own time, then as something he couldn't put down.

He records under the name Mark Kelus. Fuel Of My Soul The Hole came first, written while he was losing his farm, his properties, and a relationship all at once — the kind of record that only gets made when there's nothing left to do but write it down. Red Room came later, during his Kelus Riverside bar days, when the songs were living in the same room as the work. Together the two records carry the weight of everything that happened along the way. Later he put together a backing band, Mark Kelus and the Barn Burners, for a more country-leaning run called Wiskey Time, cutting tracks like "One More Round," "Forbidden Fire," "Welcome Home," and "What Broke Me More" — songs that sound like where he's from as much as what he's been through. A country kid who never really left the dirt roads behind, even after the trucks got bigger and the towns got smaller in the rearview. A life spent building things by day, and writing about it by night.