Chris Cappell started his songwriting career when he was fifteen while touring as a guitarist/backing vocalist for Creambossali’, one if Italy’s fastest rising bands. The group was a finalist in a national contest for upcoming talent and won the Emergenza Rock contest, which placed them on a compilation album showcasing their country’s hottest rising stars. At 16, Cappell came to America and enrolled in a summer session at the prestigious Berklee College of Music, where he aced all of his courses. Cappell returned to Italy and formed Ocean, gigging continuously and headlining events for as much as 4,000 people.

While on a visit to GSU studios in Switzerland, Cappell had one of those life-changing moments when he met Mina, one of Italy’s biggest recording artists.
“I went there to check out their state-of-the-art recording equipment,” Cappell recalls, “and then Max Pani, Mina’s producer, introduced me to her.”
Regarded as Italy’s most beloved female singer, Mina is to her country what Celine Dion is to Canada and Whitney Houston is to the United States.
A household word and national treasure, Mina asked Cappell, then barely twenty, to bounce some songwriting ideas off of her. “She said, ‘I know you won’t disappoint me,’ “ Cappell remembers. “This was my big chance, and I wasn’t going to blow it.”

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