"I was never too shy, particularly with like being embarrassed about writing my own stuff," Bay explained. "I remember this completely naive kind of confidence like, 'I can do this. I can write songs.' So I was always pretty carefree."

Bay was just 11-years-old when he picked up his first guitar. It was a five-string clunker that he found in a cupboard in his bedroom. It belonged to his dad when he was just a boy and hadn't been used in years. "It was all rusty and falling apart," Bay said. "But there was something magical about it when I held it in my lap."

He knew he needed to learn how to play it, but instead of asking his parents for lessons, he took matters into his own hands. "I bought a CD-ROM," Bay said laughing. In the end, he taught himself how to play by picking things up by ear, starting with standard 12-bar blues patterns and moving into more contemporary folkies like Ray Montagne.

When he was in his teens, Bay would hole-up in his bedroom with his electric guitar working on songs that he admits, now, sounded quite similar to the artists that he was listening to at the time: The Rolling Stones, the Black Crowes and Eric Clapton.

"There's something about being that age, music becomes a different beast and a lot stronger," Bay explained. "It wasn't only that I suddenly started hearing music, people like The Stones and bands like that that my parents listened to, I really started feeling something for those bands all of a sudden."

With his first release, The Dark of the Morning EP, Bay wanted to keep things simple and have it sound like his live show, which is often just him and his acoustic guitar. Just like when he was a kid, these songs focus in on his personal life. "It's all little snapshots of experience and relationships," Bay said of the EP.

Bay says that his own life is at once the easiest thing to write about and the hardest. The EP's first single, "Move Together," is a perfect example of that dichotomy.