Wednesday, August 26, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon WALLACE: Artist has found his new home in Sisters Continued from page 3 while he was growing up, and Wallace aspired to be a musi- cian himself. When he was around age 8 or 9, his father bought him and his brother a cheap acoustic guitar and if they learned basic chords on that one, they could play his nicer instruments. “I started being able to play really well and very early on, writing became ingrained in me as well,” Wallace told The Nugget. In 2004, his family moved their home base from North Carolina to Fort Worth, Texas, where they served as xican missionaries on the Mexican border for three years. “After that experience and seeing so much in that area, I was about to go into high school and that is when my songwrit- ing really took a turn and I est had this drive to be the best that I could,” he said. ning Wallace grew up listening usic to primarily Christian music d on and writing music based ed to scripture. Wallace wanted branch out to his own song- writing style and write about his life experiences and have n. his songs be truly his own. “It became less of a wor- ship style and more toward journalistic stories and expe- riences,” he said. Wallace had joined a song- writing group where every February, members of the annual event write songs for the entire month and see who comes up with the most songs for the month. “This experience really gave me a lot of confidence and positive reinforcement during my formative singer- songwriter time,” he said. Shortly after February with a new booklet of songs in hand, Wallace holed up in a cabin in Austin, near the Llano River, and wrote the first single he released in 2018, “Orange Haze.” Shortly after the release of that single, Wallace recorded his first EP in Fort Worth titled, “Where the River Meets the Ocean.” During the process of writing this EP, Wallace had taken a road trip from Texas up to the Columbia River Gorge and Oregon Coast with his brother. “I had a spiritual moment while standing on a rock on the Oregon Coast looking out on the ocean and I started the writing process for the rest of the EP,” said Wallace. The title for the EP came from a connection to where he wrote the first song, along the river in Austin, all the way to the ocean where he finished the writing of the songs. Wallace said: “It was a sort of metaphor for the journey from the desert to the ocean in the process and it was something my Mom had said to me and it clicked.” Wallace¾s song,