Home » About Me
About Mark Scudder
Tall, neurotic, socially-awkward, passionate fan of life and people, strongly opinionated but generally harmless. My name is Mark, and I make stuff.
Music, production, and technology have been a lifelong fascination for me. When I was seven years old I found a patch cable, and discovered that I could hook my little carry-around cassette player to my father's cassette deck and copy or edit audio. I discovered and understood at a very early age that I could be a content producer as well as a content consumer, and I liked that a lot.
I was an only child in a neighborhood full of old people, with an overprotective mom who was indoctrinated by Phil Donahue's daytime talk show, becoming filled with such fear and worry about what could potentially happen to me that she kept me on a very short leash, and I had to find other ways to entertain myself. I would play with my G.I. Joes or my Transformers and narrate their "adventures" into my tape recorder. On the rare occasions that my two cousins on my mother's side would come to visit, I would record that too, to memorialize anything neat or funny that happened. Like people post YouTube videos today, I recorded my memories with what I had available. By the time I was 12 I had a small "discography" of adventures with custom case cards made with pencil and magic marker.
Since then I've recorded albums, produced albums for others, played a bunch of live shows, spent almost a decade doing radio, and leveraged the power of the internet to bring it to people. Currently I am working on my next two solo albums and performing in southeast South Carolina.
I have struggled throughout my life with depression and anxiety. While these are considered "mental illnesses," that term carries such a terrible stigma I am hesitant to use it. I liken it more to a sort of emotional cancer, and I use that phrasing purposely - because the average person has fortunately been made aware of the horror of cancer; while mental illnesses are still very stigmatized and misunderstood. Unfortunately they rely on defining a patient as "different from normal," which in turn requires that there be a definition of "normal" - that's a dangerous thing indeed, considering some of the things that pass for "normal" these days. In reality I'm passionate and principled and emotional. It upsets me when people show hatred, selfishness, prejudice, and malice. Other people say "meh" and go about their business like nothing happened. That's what's considered "normal," so I guess I'm guilty as charged. To understand me is to understand this affliction, and recognize it as a disability - and as with any other disability, understanding that I can do anything with the tolerance and compassion of those around me is the key. There is very obviously a theme of anxiety and the stigma of mental illness in my music and writing, and I do not plan to stop exploring it. I'm blessed to have the opportunity to educate people about this disability.