My name is Vahé Akay. Singer Songwriter, writing multi genre originals, with eastern & western influences. I am half Armenian, Half Syriac. I was born and raised in Baghdad Iraq. Moved to the US when I was Nineteen.

I’ve traveled to 34 countries and lived in 4 of them, and been to 36 out of the 50 united states of America. I grew up listening to English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Armenian, Greek, India and Turkish music. As I grew up, I then added music from Portugal, Romania, China Taiwan, Japan, Israel, Brazil, Native America, Peru, Caribbean, and Africa. I’ve listened to and enjoy many musical genres from rock, pop and blues to ballads, country and classical. As you may imagine, these influences have hugely impacted the accents, sounds, and types of music I’ve been creating.

I got into music with drums. My first memory of drumming was when I was 7 years old. I loved to drum on anything. My parents had an old fashioned hard-leather luggage piece. I used to ride it like a horse, use my feet to make the kick drum sound, wooden utensils as sticks to beat the top of the luggage as snare and toms, and a pot lid as the symbol. That was the start of my drumming life. Years later when I was a teenager, I met a neighbor who was an excellent drummer. We became friends and he was the influence to get me into playing the drums for real. I sold my toys and some of my clothes to buy myself an old, hand-made real wood drum set with real leather heads. Every time one ripped, I had to take it to a music shop, get a new one custom made to fit, stretched and installed. It was something to see and experience. But it sounded great. I taught myself how to drum on that set.

Less than a year after I started learning drums, I got the urge to create my own songs. So, I picked up the guitar. One of my friends had an extra guitar and used to let me keep it few weeks at a time. I taught myself how to play it.
I wrote my first song when I was 15 years old. It was called Dusty Road. This is how it came about. Funny but true. Baghdad is one of the most fertile lands on the planet because the Tigress and Euphrates rivers pass through and met in the city and then continue south to the Persian Gulf. However, a couple of times during the summer, we would get a sand storm that blew in from the west. Hence Dusty Road where I was looking for my girl.

When I moved to the US, I became very good friends with a bass guitarist, Bernard. He was also a singer songwriter. We collaborated on songs we’d created but not completed, and wrote one song together, Loving You Loving Me. We entered contests with that song and won first prizes and honorable mentions. With this track record, we decided to do music full time. Bernard was going to quit his graphics design job/career and I was going to quit college. Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for our plans, Bernard met and fell in love with a beautiful woman and moved to Southern California, and that was that!

As a one-man band, I have created the melodies and written the lyrics for over 80 songs and collaborated with a couple of friends, Bernard being one of them, on about a dozen pieces. I played all the instruments in my songs, mixed, and mastered all my songs in my home studio. I decided to revive the old band name Question Mark but with a twist. QuestionmarQ was born.

I would love to have some of my songs and melodies picked up/covered by performing artists/bands, record/music labels, and/or movie studios.