Mark Russell was both. Playing lacrosse at his university in Florida, Mark’s friends didn’t even know he sang, at first: “I was sitting in my dorm room with my guitar, singing quietly to myself when my roommates walked in. They had never heard me – I didn’t have any confidence in my voice – so they started making me go around door-to- door in the girls’ dorm: ‘Can I sing for you?’ I was still kinda quiet and shy with it, though”. You’d never guess that now. Mark’s powerhouse vocals lead the way through love ballads and uptempos alike, showing off his wide range of musical influences. “I love Maroon5 and One Republic, Lil Wayne and Chris Brown”, Mark says of his taste in music. “I’m all across the board, but I don’t see that as a bad thing.” Mark’s first look as a solo artist was “Dance”, with a series of music videos championed by MTV.com. iHeartRadio has since championed his acoustic album, a series of songs done in “One Take”. He continues to release new music on a regular basis, not wanting fans to wait too long for new music. “I don’t want to wait six months to a year between releases”, Mark says. “I just want to constantly give the fans something new, and if I’m recording new music I figure, why shouldn’t they have it too?” At the end of the day, Mark approaches his music like a fan, playing the music that he’d want to listen to. “If there was an artist out there who wrote the music I wanted to write and played it the way I wanted to play it, I wouldn’t play, cuz I’d have everything I want to listen to. It’s real, its what I want to do, it’s how I want to say it, how I want to sing it, how I want to play it, and . . . it’s honest; its totally me.”