Some big brothers give their siblings hand-me-down clothing. Others pass down a bike or their old textbooks. But Reinholds native Dan Asroff’s big brother inadvertently passed along something infinitely cooler: a music career.

“I was always interested in music and performing, but never got into anything until three years ago when my brother got a guitar for Christmas,” the younger Asroff recalls. “When he got it, immediately he lost interest and I picked it up and taught myself.”

It didn’t take long for the then-14-year-old to turn his first barre chords into songs. For inspiration, Asroff looked to pop-culture touchstones like John Mayer and, for wordplay, Asher Roth, but currently counts among his biggest influences the newest generation of rock stars, including bands like All Time Low and Mayday Parade. The resulting catalog of songs is the stuff of campfire singalongs, as earnest and raw as one would expect from a teenager in post-emo America, simple songs driven by plaintive melodies and Asroff’s unadorned, confessional lyrics. File between Secondhand Serenade and Dashboard under “Soundtrack to a breakup.”

In April 2009, Asroff took his music public with the release of an EP, Set The Scene, which he promptly offered up as a free download on Pure Volume in an effort to market himself to the digitally savvy set. He coupled that with a regional tour schedule that in the past year has included shows with national acts like Hit The Lights, 1997, Disney star Mitchel Musso and one of Asroff’s personal favorites, A Rocket To The Moon, at venues like the Laserdome and the Chameleon. The response so far is everything an independent artist could have hoped for.

“Things couldn’t be going any better for me,” Asroff says. “Although writing in my room is fun, there couldn’t be a better feeling than playing live. I love the feeling of being on stage and singing my lungs out. Playing live is the best feeling in the world.”

Asroff is currently in the process of recording a full-length, to be released within the next year, preceded by a new single. “I am really putting in all my time and money into this,” he says. Fans can get a sneak preview of new material at his headlining show this month at the Laserdome; making the evening doubly special is the fact that it is Asroff’s 18th birthday.