Musician//Songwriter
"My story spans the ancient sites of Peru and China, the beaches of Hawaii to those in Thailand, the rich culture in Nicaragua to the colors of New York City, and the Northern forests of America to the quiet deserts of the Southwest. The adventures are organized chaos. I make choices to go down certain roads, but the results are unforeseeable, often serendipitous, sometimes emotionally taxing, and are always, as they are. I am driven to express my experiences, and my philosophical analysis of them, in the form of words and music. When I do so, I feel alive."
Tim McDill is a singer and multi-instrumentalist. The Maui-based, Portland raised musician has a melodic, yet sporadic style that skirts the genres of indie-folk, singer-songwriter, rock, instrumental, and alternative, but seldom lands in one. His inventive lyrics are accented by fluttering vocal harmonies, unique guitar licks, and occasional unexpected timing changes.
Brought up among a six-pack of siblings with a range of music preferences, Tim’s musical influence started at a young age. First picking up the guitar at 11, he started learning covers of the music commonly listened to in his home, such as Simon and Garfunkel, Dave Matthews, Incubus, and his childhood favorite, Switchfoot. Once in high-school, his musical taste expanded to include edgier, lesser known artists like Owen Pallett, Dirty Projectors, and Y La Bamba - thanks to his friends - leeches of the booming music-pirating culture of that time. Embracing the emotional catharsis of youth, he was deeply moved by the songwriting of Sufjan Stevens, Elliott Smith, Ben Gibbard, and Andrew Bird, and those influences are clearly shown in McDill’s lyrically-focused songs.
In 2011, after high-school graduation, Tim uprooted from the cradle of the Portland suburbs to live autonomously in Maui, Hawaii. The move brought an exposure to new-age spirituality and a community emphatic about self-development and conscious living. Naturally, spiritual themes entered his songwriting, often alluding to the plight of the “seeker” and the challenges inherent in stripping down layers of societal conditioning and rewiring the brain for visceral human experience.
Throughout his early 20’s, his passion for music was met by an equally strong zeal for international travel and culture, as well as high level disc golf competition. He became fluent in Spanish during his extensive travels in Latin America, and engaged closely with local peoples of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and Peru. His journeys off of the beaten path of tourism, coupled with his fluency in the Spanish language, gave an uncommon angle of the reality in under-developed countries and seeded an acute awareness of the contrast between their lifestyles and his own suburban U.S. upbringing. This theme is alluded to in several of McDill’s songs. In the winter of 2018, a visit to China, Thailand and Malaysia sparked the idea for a song of travel stories, which he wrote and titled “Passport”. He recorded a basic, one-take version of the song and set it to a montage of videos from his many travels.
After spending most of 2020 laying low in the backcountry of the western United States, Tim recorded the song “This is 2020” in September in a studio in Ogden, Utah. The drums were played by Jason Vaughn and all other instruments were written and performed by McDill. Two other songs written earlier in the year are in the early stages of recording - “Adios Abrazos” and “Pinyon Pines,” and a revisit of a song written in 2016, “Rabid Truffle Pig,” is set to be the next release.
McDill lives in Hawaii and performs at local venues and events.