Autumn 2006 had arrived and Syd was parked on the side of a road in Boston. Despite his best laid plans, everything had fallen apart on him again.

It had been almost a year since he spent two weeks in a Vermont studio recording what was supposed to be the album that defined him as an artist, as a singer-songwriter. But now, all these months later, not one final mix had resulted from his hard work and so, while driving through Boston, Syd couldn’t help but pull over to ask himself, “How the hell did I end up here?” And, you know, maybe shake his steering wheel a bit.

Rewind some, to 2004 when Syd’s debut Fault Lines was released. After the Vermont native scored an impressive 500,000 downloads on mp3.com with earlier demos in 2002, his new album – acoustically driven pop a la John Mayer or Jack Johnson, with a lot of pining and lovelorn lyrics (albeit with a degree of earnestness Syd’s songwriting and voice always offer) – was intended to create a foundation for him as a singer-songwriter and it succeeded on all counts. Syd toured literally hundreds of colleges across North America, Fault Lines went on to sell a surprising 3,000 units, and Music Connection named it one of the “Top 25 Demos of the Year.” All of his albums sold an impressive combined 23,000 digital downloads on the major music stores.

But still, something was missing. “I was going through a reevaluation of my life,” Syd explains. “What am I doing as a musician, touring all the time? It’s starting to get really old playing all these college shows, and having people request songs I don’t really like anymore.” He can’t help but add, “At that point, playing an acoustic guitar for me was like sleeping with an ex-girlfriend I’d been over for years.”

And so it was time for a change, time to shake things up. In January 2006, Syd hit the studio again and recorded a series of songs that were not only new, but entirely unlike anything else he had ever laid down. For starters, they were electric guitar-driven, which, seeing as though Syd had never really played the electric guitar in a studio for an album, was a bit of a problem. Solution: He taught himself as he went along, and somehow it worked. Then there were the new sonic flavors; gone were the Jack Johnson licks and in were indie influences like Death Cab for Cutie, Saves the Day, The Get Up Kids, and Superdrag as well as, gasp, even 80s dance-pop – music he’d been listening to all along, but now was wearing on his sleeve.

“About every third take of the rehearsal, we nailed the song,” Syd says. He had brought in his touring band, which included guitarist/bassist Dylan Allen (The Boy Bathing) and drummer Sam Smith (Ben Folds, The Comfies) to record with him. “From there, we just started putting together the pieces – but we still didn’t know what we were doing.” In fact, they were making it up as they went along (call it faith). “By the time we were done, there were like seventy tracks on some of these songs. After that, we went out on tour and left our mixer with this huge mess to clean up.”

If only the mixing had gone as smoothly as the studio sessions. “The pieces we left him with were so dense, in such shambles, I had to keep coming back to clean things up and make things more poignant,” Syd continues. A lot of that had to do with the fact that the mixing was being done via Syd’s direction over e-mail, a not all-together effective process. The months began to drag on.

And that’s how Syd ended up on the side of a road in Boston, definitely, er, not shaking his steering wheel. But, as is wont to happen to happen to artists, inspiration struck and Syd soon found himself on the phone with another old friend, producer Danny Weinkauf (They Might Be Giants, Fountains of Wayne, David Mead). “I said to him, ‘I’m almost out of money, I’m definitely out of time, I’ve got this thing, I think it’s good. If it is, will you find somebody to mix it for me? Can I lean on you just for this last mile?

“He listened to it and responded immediately,” Syd continues. “He was just impressed by my growth as a songwriter and musician. So, the next thing I know, I’m in his basement in Long Island with the rough mixes cut down to twenty to forty tracks from seventy and he’s connected me with Jeff Thall, a lifelong friend of Danny’s who used to play guitar for Bryan Ferry and is doing all of these amazing mixes kind of on the side”

The mixes exceeded Syd’s expectations and even his hopes. He had had found the balance he had always been looking for as an artist, a way to juggle his playful onstage musicianship with his more aggressive studio inclinations – all while paying homage to the sounds that had really got him where he was (no offense to the Mayers and Johnsons of the world). Everything he had been through suddenly felt like the prologue to something much bigger.

“This is the foundation where I want to start,” he says enthusiastically. “Where Fault Lines felt like a mile marker, this feels like a new highway. That’s why I decided to call it The Way We Found It. So much has been discovered through this, about myself, how I work with others, and who I am as a songwriter.”

The Way We Found It – which has been receiving 150 downloads a day on Myspace since its first single “On a Friday” was posted – will be available in stores and online on Tuesday, April 24. That same week, Syd will continue his habitually relentless touring schedule when he begins a two-week-long series of dates throughout the East Coast and other select cities in order to introduce his fans, old and new, to the singer, songwriter, and musician they only thought they knew.

Points of interest:
~"The Way We Found It" is Syd's third album

~Danny Weinkauf (They Might Be Giants, Fountains of Wayne, David Mead) produced "The Way We Found It"

~"The Way We Found It" was recorded in a barn in Vermont

.~ All of Syd's albums have sold a combined 23,000 digital downloads on iTunes, Napster, etc.

~Syd's last album "Fault Lines" sold 3000 copies
and won Music Connection magazine's "Demo of the Year" award.

~Syd has played hundreds of shows a year since 2002 as a solo performer and with a rock band.

~ A list of artists he's shared the stage with includes singer/songwriters like Edie Carey, Stephen Kellogg and The Sixers and Ari Hest as well as bands like Cake and The Zombies.

~With a strong college touring history, Syd was nominated Coffeehouse Performer of the Year in 2005 by Campus Activities Magazine

~Syd won Hanson's opening band contest in 2006, appearing with them in Boston