Mike comes from Delaware County, Pennsylvania known as DELCO. He’s a drummer and has played in several bands in his younger years for about 25 years since graduating high school back in 1993. He says it is always a lot of fun playing hardcore punk rock music because it's fast and high energy like driving down the highway while sitting behind a drum kit! MarkyZ needed a place to stay since he had to get out of the city so he posted on Facebook looking for a place to rent out and Mike saw the post and reached out and told him he could stay with him and rented out a room since he had known him for a very long time and he could count on MarkyZ, so he gave him a bedroom to stay in so Big mike has always supported all the hard work MarkyZ for 30 years he has been putting into writing music, recording, and performing in his music projects even the tribute band Knights Reign “Ultimate DIO Experience” he plays bass in for almost 7 years now!
So one day as he set up a small recording home studio in his room where Big Mike heard him playing one of his songs he was writing on the guitar and asked if that song he was working on had any lyrics to it yet MarkyZ replied with “no not yet” so Mike asked if he could write some lyrics. Big Mike was always told its best to write what you know and the funniest part to him is knowing what to write about. He always loved poetry and Jim Morrison from The Doors which opened his eyes to that world for sure! So he wrote lyrics for the song he called “Shut Up! Voices in my Head” and gave it to MarkyZ “The Mad Scientist” he would call him and he loved what Big Mike wrote so in the lyrics there is line in the very beginning of the song that you hear a guy laughing and saying “just look at him” while it depicts a mental illness person having an episode in public and the rest of the song is about not making fun of these people it’s not there fault! Big Mike said “I would then overwrite lyrics and then MarkyZ would arrange them to fit the music he would compose and it just worked out great! During the collaboration of MarkyZ’s composing of music and Big Mike’s lyrics he thought of a band gesture like DIO has the “horns up” we now have the 11:11 hand sign gesture making the 11 symbol!

A few days later MarkyZ tells me that he was introduced to Anthony Albanese from his Mental Illness Awareness project called “The ZUGU Project” as Anthony also suffers from mental illness as well and talked about putting the song on a compilation CD for awareness in support of people with mental illnesses so it's really funny how things seemed to work out. So together we really hope and pray this song will help heal and open your eyes to the people out there suffering with these mental illness afflictions in their lives. Mike really prays that this song reduces the stigmatism of people who suffer from these different types of mental illnesses.