(Short) Biography
Jordan Sokel is multi-instrumentalist singer songwriter and founding member of Pressing Strings. For over a decade he has been performing, touring, and releasing music under the PS moniker while calling Annapolis, Maryland home. He began playing guitar around the age of 14 when he was gifted a golden Squier Strat for his birthday and began teaching himself to play.
From there he dove into curating and studying all kinds of musical styles taking particular interest in 60’s & 70’s rock, soul and reggae as well as obvious late 90's/early 2000's contemporary guitar driven songwriter staples like Ben Harper, Dispatch, Jack Johnson, Dave Matthews, jazzy leaning hip hop like A Tribe Called Quest, The Pharcyde, Outkast, Jurrasic 5 etc.
He spent his early child hood growing up in in Kendall Park, New Jersey. At the age of ten his family moved to a suburb south of Phoenix, Arizona called Awatukee Foothills bordering the Gila River Native American reservation. At the age of thirteen his family moved to Arnold, Maryland located just outside of the state capital of Annapolis. “I think moving to Maryland was one of the main catalysts that set me on the path of being a songwriter and working musician.
It was the first time I had lived somewhere where the radio stations were tied so closely to the local culture and did a great job spinning interesting music that wasn’t just top 40. Even better they spun and supported local bands and it inspired myself lot of people around me. Everything was accessible and it was the time of burning and sharing personalized mixes with your friends and I was the right age to soak it all in.”
Now Sokel and his band's music are regularly featured on these same radio stations.
Their most recent album “Minutes to Midnight ” features the track “Forty Miles” penned by Sokel and voted by listeners as the #9 song of the year in Baltimore's WTMD’s Top 89 Songs of 2024.