"Eventually, it snapped in me one day: I gotta record this album, get on the road and play it for people."
In early 2010, Marc Hennessey, 25, went around Gainesville telling people that in a year, he would release one of the best albums Gainesville has seen in a long time.
"That's really not right to say, because there are so many good bands in town, but I was really confident about it," Hennessey said.
At the time, he was working at Renaissance Printing. He was treated well, and the wages were good, he said. But all he really wanted to do was play the violin.
In the sixth grade, every school day he would leave his home in Lutz, Fla., to travel 45 minutes across town to an inner-city school.
Hennessey first fell in love with the violin when a woman visited his school and demonstrated how the instrument is played.
"I went home that day and was like, ‘Mom, mom, mom, you gotta let me play the violin!'"
Hennessey came from a family with no musicians. But, despite his mother's fears of screeching violin practices, she caved in and said he could play the violin.
Hennessey studied intensely, taking three years of private lessons and attending Blake High School for the Arts. Later, he studied violin performance in Tampa and then came to UF to study composition.
But he didn't finish.
After a semester and a half, he left school and spent six months traveling the U.S. in an RV with his mom, visiting a petrified forest, the Grand Canyon and Carlsbad Caverns, among other American attractions.
He was through with the music program.
"Not going to the school of music was the smartest thing I ever did," he said.
Hennessey had studied for years. He knew the rules.
"I didn't like the music department," he said. "They were doing all this weird music that wasn't music I liked. It's what they needed you to learn."
But Hennessey had an epiphany when he discovered loop pedals. With that, he realized he could become a one-man orchestra.
During performances today, Hennessey plays one melody. Then he loops it so that the melody plays over and over again. He builds layers of melodies, sometimes using a pedal to change octaves so his violin sounds like a cello. By a song's climax, Hennessey, along with local band To All My Dear Friends drummer Greg Stull, create a wall of violin riffs and percussions that sound almost too immense and intricate to be coming from the two.
Six months after his "best albums" proclamation, the pressure was on. He began work on To All My Dear Friends's new album, "Transparent Voyages."
"I wanted it to be something amazing that people could really appreciate as a piece of art," Hennessey said. "There's so many lazy people in the world when it comes to everything -music, film."
He spent hours upon hours and days upon days taking pages of notes about what he wanted to do with the record.
"When people come to my show, I want them to know that I put a lot of time into this, just so that they could come to that show and listen to it," he said.
Typically, his inspiration hits him in waves, or storm bands as he described it.
When asked about the writing process, Hennessey refers to a quote from a southern poet whose name has escaped him.
He couldn't remember the exact words but tried to paraphrase:
Imagine a woman out in a field, he said. Imagine a storm tumbling toward her and the woman running inside as fast as she can to get a pen before the wind gets her. The oncoming gust is her inspiration, and she knows that as soon as it passes, it's gone forever.
"That's how it is for me," he said. "I just all of a sudden get this urge where something starts playing in my head. I don't know what key it's in. I don't know what instrument it is necessarily. It's just like this thing, and I have to sit down."
The 12 tracks Hennessey recorded in November 2010 veer away from the more pop-driven direction of the first album. Only four of the songs feature vocals.
Though Hennessey said he enjoys singing and writing poetry, he naturally found himself taking the instrumental route on the record.
"I think instrumental stuff, in particular, really reaches out to people," he said. "It's a universal language."
Hennessey first realized the power of instrumental music when he began to play live. He was used to having 20-something fans come up to him after shows, but one particular show opened his eyes to the range of his audience.
Hennessey remembers playing a show about one year ago when, after playing, a feeble 70-year-old woman approached him and said his music had brought her to tears.
"It just blew my mind," he said.
It appears he's had no problem finding support.
Recording the new album wiped out all of his money, leaving him nothing to pay to get CDs made. But Hennessey seems to find ways to get things done with a bit of elbow grease.
He built his website himself. After watching YouTube tutorials on using Dreamweaver, he spent a few weeks and produced a site he said he's proud of.
When it came time to raise money to print the album, Hennessey decided to use www.kickstarter.com, which offers musicians a forum to ask for donations to make albums.
Again, he taught himself, learning to edit videos to put one on the fundraiser page.
In 30 days, he reached his goal of $3,650.
Hennessey plans on debuting a short film for one of the album's songs, "A Silent Collapse," at the release party. He's been working on the stop motion, live action, animation video with local puppeteer, artist and filmmaker Krissy Abdullah. He tries to use local artists as much as possible.
"There's so much good art in Gainesville," he said. "There's so many talented people."
Hennessey leaves April 1 to tour the U.S.
With his print job behind him, he's supporting himself by performing. All he wants to do is make a living off of it. He said he's just looking to get by.
"Anybody could be touring around the country playing music if they really wanted to, but they've got to want to do it," he said. "Otherwise, they're going to struggle the whole way."
