Jim Gaven is a 20-year old Seton Hall University student and aspiring acoustic Emo singer/songwriter who hails from Hamilton, New Jersey. He has been writing songs and playing live up and down the east coast for close to three years. Songs about breakup, relationships, hardship, and religious experiences showcase his heartfelt writing. If you like groups such as Dashboard Confessional, Bright Eyes, Feeling Left Out, The Spill Canvas and Remember Maine, you’ll like Jim Gaven. And I’ll make my prediction right now: this guy is going places.

One of his best songs, “On Your Way (To Unhappiness),” starts out with a catchy entreaty, “Hey, there, look over here,” and proceeds into an emotional story of a hopefully-amicable-breakup-to-be-turned-unpleasant-parting, if you follow my Emo thought pattern. The singer is deeply hurt, yet puts up the I-couldn’t-care-less-if-you-were-dying front before finally baring his soul in the line “the face I can’t [bear] seeing.” The song shows Gaven’s feel for a well-structured lyric and his ability to stir the stew of mixed feelings we have all experienced at one time or another. Moreover, it shows that songwriting is often an inherent talent, considering that Gaven has never taken a songwriting course or attended a songwriting workshop. With a bit of strategic re-writing and smoothing out the phrasing a bit, this song has “hit” written all over it. Read the Singing Songwriter interview…