Marc Copely:
Vocals/Guitar
Joe Magistro:
Drums
Winston Roye:
Bass
Adam Widoff:
Guitar

By all accounts, Marc Copely shouldn't even be alive.

Not after that car accident -- the one that left his body broken and his life hanging in precarious balance.

Even setting that aside, those years spent as a kid on the streets of Main South, the grittiest neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, should have beaten him down into a life of poverty, diminished spirit, and no hope.

And yet …

Here he is, poised at the edge of what may be one of the most spectacular album debuts in years, with a discful of passionate songs and intense, focused performance.

Marc Copely has already beaten the odds several times. With the release of Limited Lifetime Guarantee, he just may do it again.

He's a survivor, who's learned how to chase down his dreams and make them happen. His album tells the stories of his life, in songs with vivid lyrics that ride escalating melodies into fist-pumping choruses. Copely delivers this material with slashing guitar lines and a raw, gutsy voice. It's a sound you won't forget: classic yet contemporary, timely and timeless.

Its roots reach back to Main South, where Copely spent his weekdays as a kid getting his knuckles rapped in Catholic school, his weekends hanging with his buddies, and his nights at home, listening to his father and his uncles sing. "My dad is a trained opera singer," he remembers. "He still has a barbershop quartet. There were always vocal albums around the house: a lot of Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, harmony-driven stuff."

Marc learned from what he heard, developed deep ties with his parents -- and rebelled. At fourteen he stopped crooning and started hammering away at his first guitar. "It was an old Sears nylon-string thing -- the worst guitar in the world," he laughs. "One day I came home from baseball practice, and a couple of my friends were playing guitar together. I was like, 'Oh, man, I'm just sitting around, not doing anything.' So they threw this thing in my hands. That's what I learned on for a good year, because I couldn't afford to buy one."

His heroes were the guitar gods: Hendrix, Clapton, Jeff Beck. With help from the older brother of one of his friends, Marc started copping their licks. He loved the power and expression that the legendary players got from their instrument -- but there was something else. "The thing that really struck me was that the songs were great. You can play 'The Wind Cries Mary' just on an acoustic guitar, and it sounds amazing. That's what really hit me, that the songwriting level was so high. You had these great songs, and then when you added the sonics and the improvisation, like on a Cream record, that gave you a certain amount of danger as well."

His teen years flashed past in a blur of garage jams and gigs. He soaked up every kind of music he heard, from the R&B and Latin albums that were the soundtrack of Main South to the wildly diverse set lists he'd put together with his bands. "We'd do a Blind Faith song, a U2 song, a Van Halen song … and then we'd have to play modern stuff for our friends who didn't want to know about Derek and the Dominoes or Hendrix."

Soon the word spread throughout Boston: Marc Copely was a guitarist to watch. He was out each night, working the clubs, building his rep. His phone was ringing with job offers. He got into the prestigious Berklee School of Music; for a year, until his money ran out, he studied performance, theory, jazz, and even English literature.

Today, looking back, he knows it all came a little too easily. He was coasting without even knowing it. He would need something to slap him into real action, to awaken the potential he had come to take for granted.

It came without warning -- the bloody car crash that left him with severe head trauma, two fractures in his left arm, a broken left wrist, a dislocated shoulder, bruised ribs, a badly injured back. "It was horrible," he says. "I shouldn't have lived through it."

But he did, and as he began his long discovery, Marc began to change. "It was like, 'Hey, I might not be alive tomorrow,' so I wanted to get to the center of what I was feeling," he says. "Before that accident, I didn't have any kind of focus. I had ambitions, but I didn't have the guts to pursue them. But the impact of living through something like that made me start to write more consistently. I became way more prolific."

And he began building his guitar chops back, literally from scratch. Bit by bit he recovered his strength, and soon he was working again -- on gigs as diverse as a long road tour with folk/punk innovator Mary Lou Lord to an album with Boston blues harp icon James Montgomery, on which Marc served as producer.

These were valuable experiences, each feeding into Marc's broadening and deepening range. "One minute I'm doing 12-string guitar parts with Mary Lou, then I'm playing slide with James Cotton," he laughs. "The point of all that was that music is music; it all comes from the same place. It's all about playing with a lot of heart and evoking emotions, in any and all styles."

Eventually all of these elements, and all that had come before -- nights of harmony with his family, days on the streets, the Berklee jazz studies, the nightmare collision and the long recuperation -- fell into place with exceptional clarity. With that, Marc knew that his moment had come.

With that, he went to work on Limited Lifetime Guarantee. It's a trio project, with Dave Hull, from Pete Droge's band, on bass, and L.A.-based Josh Freese, from the Vandals and A Perfect Circle, on drums. David Werner, a former RCA recording artist, played the key role as producer and co-writer, with Marc, of the material as well. "It was David who served as my musical conscious and most trusted friend and collaborator," says Marc.

But Copely holds the spotlight, from that introductory chord on "Cellophane" through a noir-shadowed finale on "Brutal Light." On each track, there's a blend of passion and blazing technique that's been rare for far too long in popular music. His voice muscles through the mix, then draws us in with unexpected sensitivity. His solos are dynamic yet to the point and help reinforce and underpin the mood and messages of the songs.

Above all, Limited Lifetime Guarantee is utterly lacking in artifice. It's as real as anything you'll hear on the radio, or in your own inner playlists. From unforgettably hummable choruses to deeply personal songs, it unfolds one artist's life in music -- and promises much more to come.