Devan’s Story

A man with glasses and a shaved head sitting at a table with a guitar, looking to the side, in a room with cream-colored walls and wooden paneling.

Devan was born into a family of musicians. His father Don, his mother Ledell and his sister Katherine all studied music at Berklee College of Music. They made a living playing their  instruments and teaching music. All of them wrote their own songs. Devan started playing guitar in elementary school and making music in high school.

On August 15th, 2015 his entire family was killed in a car crash. Shoved into unimaginable grief Devan went to talk therapy for the first time. EMDR dulled the blades of the trauma but he found that talk therapy couldn’t address all the ways he needed to learn how to carry such a loss. Once he had a quiet moment to himself he started to write music about his grief. 

“There are many events in life where words fail to express everything we feel inside and all that needs to come out. For the indescribable, the act of creating art is there to guide us to a place of expression, understanding and hopefully acceptance.  Writing music has been the best filter I have to make sense of my experience and has given me a purpose when I felt I had none. It gave me a reason to continue on through the pain. It has been and will continue to be my greatest resource.”

Devan is in the final stages of completing his second record, the entirety of which is based around his loss and his grief.