Learning to Rock in the Suburbs

In a suburban area like North Potomac, a bedroom can be a sanctuary or a jail cell for a teenager. For Zia Hassan, it was a recording studio.

For the past 10 years, this North Potomac native has been self-recording his own folksy ballads, telling stories from his own life and from the lives of his friends with some lyrics and a guitar.

Now 25, Hassan is looking to share these stories and his music with the area, and particularly with high schoolers.

"The big untapped market for me is the high school in this area. Kids are dying for things to do," said Hassan, who works by day as an IBM consultant. "When I was that age, I had nothing to do but obsess over live music and bands."

In his song "When Will I Learn," Hassan sings of the raw pain of high school heartbreak.

"She lays her head down on me, and I don't know if I'm in too deep. When will I learn?" Hassan sang in a soft voice that echoes the innocence of the story.

Hassan said that song took place in North Potomac around Dufief Mill Road, when he was attending Wootton High School.

Hassan's folksy acoustic music does best in coffee-shop settings, he said. Last summer, Hassan went to Chloe's Coffee in the Kentlands and asked them if they would be interested in him performing live music.

"I was the first person they actually booked," Hassan said.

Now, Chloe's Coffee has a weekly open mic night and frequent musical performers.

Similarly, Hassan convinced Main Street Café across the street in the Kentlands to let him perform during a happy hour.

In order to be a successful musician these days, a person must also be an entrepreneur and a marketer. Hassan carries around a stack of index cards with him at all times for when he comes up with a business idea or a song lyric.

"One of the those ideas I came up with by looking at the people who do blogs online. They give away free information, but then they ask to be paid for information like consulting or book," he said.

He took that model and applied to his music. He began offering up his services as a songwriter to anyone who wanted a song written about a personal story.

Since then he has written, among other things, a song for a friend's wedding called "A Love Like That" and an emotional song for the family of a woman who had cervical cancer and couldn't have children. The woman's sister carried a child for her, and Hassan's song for the family is called "Carry My Love."

"It's something now they listen to all the time, and the daughter can listen to as well," he said.

He generally does not ask for any money in return, but some people choose to pay him for writing the custom songs.

Hassan shares most of his music online through websites such as Bandcamp and TheSixtyOne, which encourage listeners to explore indie music and where artists can post their songs for free.

This week, Hassan teams up with Andrew Kurland, another Wootton alum, in a new album combining electronic sounds and harmonic duets. It's called "Scenes" and will be released Tuesday. (Download the album for free on ziahassan.com/scenes until Tuesday.  After Tuesday it will be available for $4.)

Kurland and Hassan met just before Kurland started as a freshman at Wootton and Hassan was a sophomore. Together, they performed in the high school musicals each year but didn't start recording music until 2007.  

Although most songs from the album focus on inner struggles and broken relationships, the album still shares some reflection on growing up.  

"On [our first album] 'Love is Waiting', we wrote about our houses, our yards, the stores that have come and gone on Route 28," Kurland said. "And the first song in 'Scenes' — 'I've Been' — is partially about the mixed feelings of coming back home."

Releasing music on the web can be a painful process as a musician exposes their art to criticism, but Hassan said his best advice to anyone starting out in a suburban bedroom like he did is to let other people hear your music.

"You can dream about it all day and dream about people clapping for you," Hassan said. "You can never really truly judge how it's going to hit people until you see it."

Zia Hassan will play live at Chloe's Coffee on Oct. 2 at 8 p.m.