BIOGRAPHY
Ethan “E” Holtz was born in Beverly Hills, California on July 20, 2001. He spent the first year of his life living in the hills of Laurel Canyon not far from Lookout Mountain, which was home and creative inspiration to many young artists during the 1960s-1970s counterculture movement such as Neil Young, Jim Morrison, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Joni Mitchell/Graham Nash and Frank Zappa. Something in the soil must have seeped in, because all these musicians and songwriters would have a significant impact on E’s development as a young artist in the new millennium.
From age 2 to 12, E lived in the rural San Fernando Valley suburb of Tarzana, California. At age 5, E’s parents bought him a basic drum kit as a gift. E banged the drums for a bit and also became very good at Rock Band, an interactive drum game that was popular with kids in the early 2000s. But at 5 years old, E was more interested in Legos than anything else, so the drum kit eventually made its way to the storage space in the garage.
At 6 years old, E’s mom got him his first guitar from a small guitar shop on Ventura Blvd. E started taking lessons and proved to be a natural, quickly learning how to read notes, shape chords and play basic songs. Soon E was spending more time practicing guitar than assembling Legos. Around this same time, E took a deep-dive into his father’s extensive music collection (records and CDs) and started playing songs by legendary artists such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. E also started going to concerts with his dad, and over the ensuing ten years was able to see some of the greatest performers in rock history up close and personal, including Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, The Who, The Stones, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Pearl Jam, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, U2 and many others.
By age 11, E started writing his own songs. Within the first year E had written close to ten songs. His early songs emulated songs by artists he loved at the time, but soon E was finding his own inspiration and developing his own style and voice. By age 14 E had written over forty original songs on his acoustic guitar.
In January of 2015, E got the opportunity to go into a professional recording studio in Hollywood, California and record two songs with a highly skilled and experienced producer and engineer, Joseph Magee. The experience changed E’s life. Magee took E under his wing and helped him install a small home studio equipped with ProTools and a MIDI keyboard with Native Instruments Komplete software in E’s house in Calabasas, where E had moved in 2013. Soon E was not only writing the music and lyrics for his own songs, he was playing all the instrument parts and recording the songs and learning how to lay multi-tracks and harmonies.
Over the past few years, E has spent thousands of hours experimenting in his home studio, and his songwriting and producing skills have grown exponentially. His tastes in music have also expanded, and his relatively recent love of rap, hip-hop and trap (Kanye, Tyler, The Creator, Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott) has started to influence his writing. In the past year, E has started to blend his rock and hip-hop influences to create a new and refreshing sound all his own. He is now applying to college to study songwriting and music production, and he is excited to see where his future takes him as he shares his musical talent and vision with the world.
