46 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY DECEMBER 7-13, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com FACE TO FACE John Turri is a music director at Compass Church in Salinas and a talented singer-songwriter. He moved from Southern California to Monterey County seven years ago. Turri says part of his life feels like it was set in the Disney Channel film High School Musical. He played basketball and football in high school, well enough that Azusa Pacific University sought him out for its basketball squad. But Turri made an impromptu decision to give up college-level basketball to study music, an interest he developed only during his senior year of high school. His story doesn’t match the movie plot perfectly. For example, where the movie’s main character, Troy, is a natural vocalist, Turri found he had to work hard to develop a voice. “It was a very dramatic choice,” he admits. But he was driven, and put a lot of effort into auditioning for choirs and playing gigs at bars and weddings until he found his voice. “It was a gift that I never knew that I had,” Turri adds. Through it all, Turri says his mom was one his biggest supporters. When Turri’s mother died in 2016, pop star Ed Sheeran’s song “Supermarket Flowers” helped him mourn. Turri recorded a cover of the song, believing “the world needed to hear the song from the lens of somebody who had actually lost their mom.” One day Turri traveled to Los Angeles, told he would receive a gift from his favorite singer. Instead, there stood Sheeran—in person. Turri spent time with his favorite artist and they played “Supermarket Flowers.” Weekly: When you met your idol, Ed Sheeran… Turri: My first words to Ed Sheeran were, “Holy shit.” I just could not believe it. And he starts laughing. He gives me a hug. My mother always told me, this moment would happen when she discovered that Ed Sheeran was an inspiration to me. She would tell me, “If you keep working on it and keep getting better, one day you’re gonna sing with him.” How did you get started in music? I grabbed my dad’s guitar and went on YouTube and literally typed in “how to play guitar” and sat in front of the computer for like eight hours. Then I was just playing every day in the last few months of my senior year. I soon realized, okay, learning songs is cool, but my interest was gravitating toward making my own songs. You released an album, Penni Rae, in 2020. What can you tell us about it? The album is dedicated to my mom. It’s actually titled after her. She’s the reason that I really went for it. I spent a lot of time going through old VHS tapes from when I was only a year old and extracting audio of her talking to me. I found a video of her holding me, hitting a piñata when I was little and she’s talking to me. The album starts with an instrumental with her voice. Some of the songs celebrate her life. Other songs are love songs and things like that. I get really honest on the album toward the end. There is a song where I wrote each line while I was at her bedside in the ICU. I finished the song an hour after she passed on Mother’s Day morning, 2016. I forced myself to finish the song because I knew I would never be able to tap into that emotion to that degree again. The song is called “Sound of Silence” and it’s symbolic of the silence that I would feel when she lost her speaking voice and got really sick. The last few minutes of the song are about my promises to her to make her proud. When you write a song, where do you start? It’s so funny that you ask that, because one of the first songs I ever wrote was called “Where Do I Start?” One of the things that I like to do every day is just play—just play it mindlessly, just for the sake of enjoyment. That gets you in a place of receiving whatever the idea is. If I come up with a cool lyric idea, I’m probably grocery shopping or at the gym. Most of my lyric ideas happen at the gym. I have no idea why that is. You’re writing love songs and personal music, but you’re also active in your church. I always loved music in church, and moreso the impact that it could have on people attending. I always knew that I wanted to be involved in church in some way. And also I just like to honor my mother, as well. Do you do anything besides music? I love music so much, like that’s my hobby. If I’m not writing for myself, I’m writing music for others or helping others learn how to get better at their music. I love going to high schools and talking to students in their music programs. Song of Life Although he didn’t start out as a musician, that’s where John Turri found his voice. By Celia Jiménez Salinas singer-songwriter John Turri, 31, performs at local venues like The Beerded Bean and in Southern California. A video went viral of him and pop star Ed Sheeran playing Sheeran’s “Supermarket Flowers” together. DANIEL DREIFUSS MAKE A DONATION TODAY PROVIDING SOLUTIONS TO THE MOST PRESSING ISSUES IN MONTEREY COUNTY YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE YOUTH SUBSTANCE USE According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, by 12th grade, 46.6% of teens have tried illicit drugs.
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