Jesse Magee has a lot of songs, a great voice, and a terrific stage presence. Not to mention a pretty good story to tell. He performed at Sykesville's Concerts in the Park this July.

For Jesse Magee, nothing is more authentic than the wail and hum of hard rock. He has a serious passion for hard rock. Hard rock pours from his brain and his arms and his throat, unrestrained and completely honest. He understands that people might prefer a softer, subtler brand of pop. It's not his taste. Not authentic enough for Jesse Magee.

If it doesn't speak to him – like the bands Shinedown and Alice in Chains spoke to him when he was in pain – he's not interested.

It's the wail – the controlled scream, the belting singing style he identifies with Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, the authentic emotion of the honest lyrics – that calls to Magee, and he calls back to it with all his strength. Magee expresses his passion with a powerful, three-plus octave voice and a song-writing drive that has given his young band, Leftstronger, a new CD with a dozen originals, and another 100 Magee-penned songs waiting to be recorded.

Regulars on Baltimore's live music scene, the band is establishing a regional presence, and focuses on original music in the style of Alice in Chains, Shinedown, Creed and Soundgarden.

In Sykesville July 9th

Leftstronger – Magee, guitarist Rob Holt, drummer Eric Steven, and Spencer Jozwiak on bass and backing vocals – opened this year's Sykesville Concerts in the Park series, at Millard Cooper Park and had a crowd of attentive locals hooting and whistling for more at the end.

Magee, 25, lives in Eldersburg with his girlfriend, Andrea, and her parents, who are also his mentors and managers, but he grew up in Westminster. He was a lonely kid in school and struggled to find a band where he could fit in.

“I didn't play outside my house and didn't know how to play gigs. I couldn't find too many good musicians who wanted to get out of the basement in Westminster” – but the music was hammering its way out of him as he practiced his drums for hours, seven days a week.

Embracing a bad deal

Magee's passion and talent are especially inspirational because he was dealt a couple of bad cards. Since birth Magee has had cerebral palsy on his right side, robbing his right arm of fine motor skills, and he is legally blind. He describes his sight essentially as tunnel vision – no peripheral vision – and as a result he can't drive and tends to bump into people in crowds (which has actually worked to his benefit on occasion, such as his abrupt meeting at a concert with Hugo Ferreira of Tantric, one of his heroes). The physical limitations are both irrelevant to his talent, and central to his story, as he has embraced his experience to great advantage.

“You can do everything other people can do, but you have to do it in a different way.”

Aside from early walk-ons at coffee houses and open mike nights, Magee got his first real taste of live performance nine years ago at the Windrift Hotel in Avalon on the New Jersey shore, where at 16, he joined a cover band on stage and belted out grunge and metal tunes he'd loved growing up. He hit his stride over the next two summers singing with the band, and since then has developed a powerful voice capable of holding the kind of high, sustained notes the genre demands.

“He is an absolute singing monster on stage,” says manager and mentor Mona Freedman, who runs Groundwire Records – which she says is one of only three record labels in Maryland.

Magee has worked so hard at music – and expresses himself so honestly in his lyrics and powerful delivery – that it inspires Freedman and her husband, Jay, to work night and day to get him the recognition and opportunities he deserves.

Playing things his way

Magee took a couple of weeks of drum lessons as a kid, then taught himself the rest of the way – adopting his own right-handed technique to compensate for limited muscle control. He now teaches drums at Jams Music Store in Eldersburg with a special eye for kids with disabilities. And Jams is where he met guitarist Rob Holt.

He also adopted his own guitar-playing technique, playing a right-handed guitar upside down, using both of his thumbs to strum, with open tuning to limit the need to finger chords. Though he doesn't perform on guitar, he uses his guitar and his voice to compose – and he composes prolifically, turning out as many as five songs in a day. He plays riffs and works out a melody, humming and mouthing notes without yet refining any lyrics.

Magee writes solo – at least in the developmental stage. Sometimes he records his songs on an iPod. Frequently, however, he'll start with a riff, and, “If I play it again the next day, it becomes a song.”

Once the band practices the songs, they refine them further, but at this stage the lyrics are embryonic. He might come up with the harmony (or riff) from A to B to C, and then the band adds beats, a bass line, guitar riffs.

“I build the house and they put the furniture in.”

Lyrics develop afterward and aren't set down formally until the recording. “Lyrics are icing on the cake. I don't even come up with lyrics until I'm playing it at the shows.”

Magee clearly derives huge energy from his singing – recently his longtime friends from the cover band got him a gig singing the Star-Spangled Banner at the Avalon July 4 festival, and afterward he was stoked. And he pours equal energy and passion into his writing.

Leftstronger's CD is selling pretty well on their own web site, on iTunes, on Amazon.com, Magee says – and he's trying to get it accepted on Pandora.

See him now

Learn even more about Jesse and Leftstronger at the Sykesville Snallygaster where you can view a song and a live interview.