Walking 450 miles down the California coast to clear your thoughts and film a music video might sound insane but that’s the length singer and songwriter Marc E. Bassy goes to for his art. A true creative, he cites making music as necessary to his health and well-being as food, shelter, or sex. Marc's knack for penning honest, catchy, and heartfelt tunes has served him well for the past several years. The San Francisco-born and Los Angeles-based artist has made quite a name for himself, composing hits for the likes of Wiz Khalifa, 2 Chainz, Chris Brown, Allen Stone and pop princess PIA MIA, founding the chart-topping pop group 2AM Club, and releasing an independent EP, Only the Poets, which was acclaimed by Billboard, Complex, and SPIN in 2014. However, he hit his stride and honed his sound while working on music as a form of therapy while crashing at a friend’s pad in downtrodden East Hollywood in early 2015.

Having recently broken up with a long-term girlfriend and his band of 10 years, Marc found the strength and inspiration to cope by going through a period of self-medicating and non-stop partying, followed by binge-reading his favorite authors Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller, with whom he felt a special connection to because they too, had experienced the lowest of lows while staying in East Hollywood. Feeding his need to create as therapy, Marc got down to songwriting again, but this time, with a renewed vigor to hone in on his own sound. “I had been writing songs for other people for so long that I got a lot of practice,” he says. “Once I started focusing on my own music again, I finally realized how to combine that element of making something stick with my own voice. This style of music was what I’d always been chasing.”

The product of his aforementioned creative revelation, East Hollywood, crystallized this approach. Co-produced with collaborator Count Bassy, the five-song set cumulatively amassed 1 million Soundcloud plays-and-counting over the course of the summer and caught the attention of The Roots drummer, Questlove, who personally requested that Marc perform at his annual Roots Picnic outdoor festival. A request from friend and recent collaborator Kehlani soon followed, leading Marc to open for her tour all along the West Coast. Republic Records took notice and signed him, giving East Hollywood a proper commercial release on December 18th, 2015.

Combining boozy, bass-heavy production with brutally honest and sexy storytelling, Marc recently teamed up with Ty Dolla $ign for a melancholy song about vulnerability, trust, and unconditional love called “That’s Love.” Originally written as a song for Ty to use, Marc ultimately kept it for himself at Ty’s urging. True to Marc’s form, the song possesses two elements of his signature style; the subject matter embraces the good, along with the bad and ugly and the lyrics are autobiographical yet relatable. Explains Marc, "That song is about young love. There’s no better feeling when you and your significant other are going crazy, yelling, and fighting just because you fucking love each other so much.”

Marc doesn’t hold anything back, and this is his real voice up front for the first time. Once admitting he loves getting his heart broken because “it makes you pick yourself off the floor and do better,” Marc doesn’t hold back on sharing his most personal experiences in his songs. He explains, “I’m not afraid to be myself on a record and use the voice I’ve got. I want to share something honest with them and hope they become inspired to be themselves. I want people to feel.”