Grand Am's elusively cool, eerily beautiful "Infinity"

Infinity by Grand Am feels lush and raw at the same time. The drum bed feels messy and slept in. The synths feel eerily beautiful and the vocal presentation with a natural back in the warehouse reverb has a touch of danger blended with the cool. Grand Am is the duo of Brooklyn composer, producer and engineer James Panepinto and David McMillin, the lead singer of Chicago based rock band Fort Frances. The two have too many creative accomplishments to list (see below).

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Robb Donker

From Grand Am's Facebook:

Brooklyn composer, producer and engineer James Panepinto has been the engine behind the soundtracks heard on MTV, Showtime, A&E and CBS and in films at Sundance, Tribeca and Cannes. But his work on big and small screens represents a small fraction of his creative energy. Panepinto has been even busier outside his career in the music industry, quietly building a massive catalog of riffs, melodies and beats. Panepinto started his career assisting Grammy-nominated engineer Emily Lazar and Grammy-winning engineer Joe LaPorta who have worked their magic on records from the likes of David Bowie, The Shins and Vampire Weekend. He wasn’t focusing on the fact that he was broke, living in New York and figuring out what to do with his life after abruptly leaving a cozy job in healthcare. Instead, he was taking notes and spending late nights in the studio to make music of his own. “When I first started out, I was working 60 hours every week as an unpaid studio intern,” Panepinto says. “That may sound brutal, but it was one of the best experiences of my life.” That year paved the way to the past decade — a period during which Panepinto created hundreds of instrumental songs for alternative post-pop project Grand Am. In 2016, he finally decided to open the trunk of ideas, and he found a vocal passenger in David McMillin, lead singer of Chicago-based rock band Fort Frances. “James sent me five demos that absolutely floored me,” McMillin, a singer-songwriter who has been featured on shows on The CW, Netflix and NBC and earned lyrical honors from American Songwriter, said. “Then, he sent me around 50 more.”