Vic grady

artist / producer

Vic Grady (Artist/Producer) is the creator of 40 Years To Freedom as well as its primary songwriter/composer and central performer.

Vic began his music career as a young, ambitious, 13-year-old electric bassist, playing local gigs with his newly formed band, CristalFyre. During his first year with the band, he wrote songs set in the then current (late 1960s) blues-rock genre, but he soon gravitated to a more introspective, and melody-driven, folk-rock style, powered mainly by his love of the acoustic guitar.

By the start of his junior year in high school his listening tastes, and his creative perspective, had matured to the point where he was able to essentially define himself in terms of his songwriting, having made the decision to write songs that were upward reaching, above the common, and that reflected his deepest and most sincere values and aspirations.

Vic’s creation of the song “Dawning” in January of 1972 (and which would become the title track of his first album with 40 Years To Freedom) was one of the first fruits of his new musical and spiritual direction. Other original songs quickly followed, leading to the formation of a new band that summer, named Mosaic, which Vic organized for the sole purpose of creating an outlet to showcase his growing catalog of original material, which by this point also included compositions of a more serious, and even experimental, nature.

Later that year, Vic also began conducting, as well as composing and arranging for, his high school choir. During the remaining decade of the 1970s, and into the early 1980s, Vic performed regularly throughout southern California with various local bands and assisted several friends with their recording projects, though never finding a footing to move his own songwriting forward. Years later, in 1995, Vic renewed his determination to rise up as a songwriter/performer and began writing songs again as well as lending himself out as a bassist and vocalist to various local artists. In 2002, Vic formed his own music teaching business, Vic Grady Private Music Instruction, offering one-on-one instruction on guitar, bass, voice, and piano.

In 2018, as a result of meeting his high school bandmates at a class reunion, Vic was once again touched by the urge to record an album of his original material. After a few months and having considered several options, and finding all of them unacceptable, he realized that it was time to make the decision to move forward on his own and fund his own recording project as an independent artist. It was during this time that Vic settled on the band/project name, 40 Years To Freedom, which refers to the amount of time it had taken him to free himself to finally realize his dream. During a brief search of local studios, he met Frank Josephs, engineer and owner of Munchkin Studios, and in May of 2019 the two began working on the album “Dawning”.

frank josephs

engineer

Frank Josephs (Engineer) attended the University of Miami School of Music, and later studied classical composition and piano performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Frank is the owner of Munchkin Studios, a full-service recording studio in the Santa Clarita, CA area, and the co-owner of Perpetual Music Group, a successful and diverse music library.

As a composer, Frank has written music for major motion pictures and television, as well as a lengthy list of top-tier entertainment corporations and networks including Sony Music, Warner Music Group, Warner Brothers, Viacom, Fox News, Fox Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, Bravo, Discovery Channel, Lifetime, National Geographic, The Travel Channel, The History Channel, The Movie Channel, Oxygen, TMC, Showtime, Animal Planet, BET, TLC, Amazon, and Hulu.

As a musician, Frank has performed and/or recorded with The Dazz Band, The Dixie Dregs, Steve Vai, and Zapp & Roger. He has also performed with jazz greats Joe Lovano, Bobby Watson, and Carmen Lundy. Frank brings an impressive range and depth of musical expertise to 40 Years To Freedom in his several capacities as engineer, musical consultant, and keyboardist.