"A beautiful guitar solo, a pleading chorus, a spacey Western twang that makes you think now that ​​Firek has ridden off into the sunset, there’s a happy ending somewhere in the horizon." - Buzzbands.la

“A respect for raw expression while leaving room for nuance and beauty. Provides an immersive and mind-altering experience.” - Culture Collide

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"'Slipping On Dimes' was was originally conceived as a long-lost Ferdy song entitled 'Perestroika,'" says The Ferdy Mayne's ​​Shane O’Malley Firek. "The main character is an alcoholic illegal immigrant. A lot of things were happenstance in the writing, like mentioning "Highway 51", which runs very close to the Mississippi. I wrote this down sporadically and it created the other spaces in my mind for what kind of landscape the character was surrounded by, mostly imagined in the south. The character is paranoid and lost."

The story of ​​​​Firek, the single constant member of ​​​​The Ferdy Mayne, is one of journeys – physical, spiritual, and a combination of the two.

“I was going through massive change when I was writing this material,” ​​Firek explains. His moves from Detroit to Nashville, then to New York City, and now on the eve of the release of his self-titled debut album, to Los Angeles, all inform these songs.

“Before my sobriety, I was completely insane, in and out of jail, losing friends and putting myself in considerable debt,” he confesses. “I quit drinking around the time I began to perform in New York, and I’ve been sober a little over three years now.”

Free of the law, and free of the hold of alcohol, ​​Firek accomplishes on this album what any artist hopes to who has lived through pretty good and really bad, and that is to fully inform the work with experience.

“All songwriting is informed by place, and I wrote what I felt within whatever place I may have been in. I scrape emotion from the bare bones of locations. I was decimated by each new experience and had to put myself back together again,” he says​.

​Firek is most proud of his lyrics, and unlike some songwriters, he fights hard for them, sometimes over the course of many years.

“When I write songs, it takes a very long time. Very rarely do songs come quickly, aside from a few on this record,” he says. One that came more easily is the album’s first single and music video, ​​“Define My Name”.

​​Firek’s journey continues in 2017. Details of a tour behind the release of the debut album by ​​The Ferdy Mayne will be announced shortly​.​