I am SO excited to be sharing the first clip from Episode 1 of Live from Nonna's House!! This performance was shot in my Nonna's (Italian word for Grandma) living room. First things first I have to give a shoutout to my Nonna, who is an 86 year old woman who moved to America in the 1950s from Sardinia, Italy with my late Nonno. I've spent every holiday at her house with my family eating life changing home cooked Italian food. When I was a kid, if I ever stayed home from school because I was sick I would go to Nonna and Nonno's house and eat soup and ice cream all day. I have a lot of fond memories in this house and I'm so happy to be able to bring you all into this space!

Before we get any further, I want to shoutout the entire crew:
Video shot/edited by Stefan Forintos at Mitten Mob
Bass Guitar - Brandon Rose
Drums/Audio Engineering - Anthony Fiolek
Guitar - Ryan Haley
Alto Background Vocals - Grace Thomas
Soprano Background Vocals - Paige Chapman
Baritone Background Vocals - PJ Roberts
Photos - Emily Dekoster
House - Nonna
Keyboards, Lead Vocals, Audio Mixing/Mastering - JonPaul Wallace (me)

Sponsored by The Parlour in Hadley, Michigan and Dope Water

"Say No More" is the second song from Episode 1 of the Live from Nonna's House series. (Check out "Come Through" from the same episode:    • "Come Through" LIVE FROM NONNA'S HOUS...   ). The inspiration of this series is to emulate a Tiny Desk style energy in a space that is sacred to me. I wanted to create something where to two worlds of my music and my family and childhood can collide to create new art. My band and I actually rehearse in my Nonna's basement every week so it's already a space in which we've grown fond of creating in.

I also wanted to create a space where we can perform songs in a more stripped down fashion than we normally would at a regular show. The band and I pride ourselves in curating the most high energy and electric sets we can when we perform live, and very rarely do we pull back and do something fully stripped down. Live from Nonna's House is a vessel for us to explore new arrangements on new original music, older original music, and some cover tunes. "Say No More", which is an original song I released as apart of my first EP (link - https://songwhip.com/jonpaul-wallace/... ), was a song I was very reluctant to include in this episode while we were in the planning phase. The original track has so much energy that I wasn't sure we'd be able to create a cool rendition of it in a stripped down setting. Anthony Fiolek (drummer) was adamant that we give it a try, and it turned out to be on of my favorite performances of this episode! I had the pleasure of including my high school vocal coach Grace Thomas in this episode, and this song features her FLEXING on us at the end, showing off her amazing ad lib skills that I always looked up to!

Looking forward to the rest of this episode, there's a handful of other songs including an unreleased original and a super cool cover that I'm also excited about. This was so much fun to shoot and put together and I am so excited to share it!

Looking forward even further, we are hoping to turn this into a series with more episodes. In future episodes, we'd like to bring in some guest artists and grow this so it becomes a really cool experience for the artists involved and for everyone to watch and enjoy!