What do you do when you're a curious soul with an insatiable hunger to create stuff? Well, you could become a designer. Or a writer. Or a musician. Or you could do just what Hugo Solis does. But how does one go through so many music styles (from NOFX to Sublime and Nirvana) and end up doing something quite different, much closer to the style of Gavin DeGraw, Maroon 5 or Jonny Lang? Well, keep reading... Hugo comes originally from Barcelona, Spain, born to a middle class family with no significant relationship to music, apart from the fact that Hugo's parents would listen to loads and loads of pop-rock music, everything from The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel to Iggy Pop and Pink Floyd. Hugo himself started listening to music when he was 8 years old. His favourite artists were Roxette and The Beach Boys. Stage hunger came early, and so did the chances to perform, with Hugo getting involved in theatre plays at school and always trying to be appointed for the main role. His childhood breakthrough came with a memorable Jason Donovan playback-imitation together with a fake class band and all. None of the participants in the show could sing or play any intrument at all, including Hugo. At age 14 he started playing a spanish guitar and singing at the religious school he attended. He and his best pal had awakened to the noise of Nirvana, Soundgarden and NOFX, and they would uproar the nuns at high mass by playing the religious hymns with improvised punk-rock rhythms. From there they would go on to form Libido, a punk-rock band where Hugo was the vocalist, guitar player and composer. Lucky to live in a big city like Barcelona, the guys would often buy tickets to see their favourite acts, like The Offspring, Smashing Pumpkins and NOFX, among many others. In 1998, Hugo moved for a while to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he used his time composing and performing a lot, making some money and meeting lots of interesting people. He decided he wanted to settle there, at least for while, so he went back to Barcelona to arrange everything, but then something came along. Right after Scotland, Hugo got a chance to go to Norway on a short student exchange trip. After visiting the norwegian cities of Bergen, Trondheim and Oslo, he decided he would move to Trondheim instead of Edinburgh, which he did after only 6 months. Once in Trondheim, it didn't take long before he started composing, singing and playing guitar in another punk-rock band, The Borderline, with whom he would play for 2 very active years. The Borderline got some recognition, published a cd and won a band contest thanks to pretty intense live shows. The end of The Borderline left Hugo pretty disoriented, and in the period following he recorded a solo demo where most songs sported a similar style to that of the band. This period planted the idea of a solo career in Hugo's head, but it was probably too early and it soon got forgotten. He got in a touch with a recently formed band, Freakborn, who played sort of fusion rock, and he started composing and singing with them. It was during this period Hugo learned to play the piano and the bass, which would become important in the development of a solo career later. All the players in Freakborn were amazingly talented musicians, but the project didn't last long, mostly because all the members in the band had different priorities. By that time, Hugo had started studying Music Technology at the university, and this period was one of the most proliferous creatively speaking. Hugo and a friend from class decided they wanted to build their own studio, Interhit Studios, which they did right away. They had to work really hard and spend lots of money, but it turned out to really be worth it. From then on, Hugo moved his long working days from his room to the studio. The solo career had started. Hugo got in touch with lots of musicians and producers in town. Among them was one of the renowned Stargate Studios producers, Trond Hillestad, who got involved in Hugo's career and helped him grow as an artist and find his style. It took a lot of hard work and much experimenting and frustration, but in the end the results came to the surface right by the time Hugo discovered the music of the likes of Maroon 5, Gavin deGraw, Daniel Powter and James Blunt, some of his inspiration sources of the recent years. Hugo bought the whole studio from his partner and rebaptized it Uno Studios (www.unostudios.com). Song recording started for real, the project got more and more serious as other professionals got involved, and Hugo put together a band formed partly of ex-members of Freakborn and ex-members of The Borderline, plus a couple of young talented musicians. The friends were reunited, they all shared a vision and the music just flowed.