Beatles, Todd Rundgren, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Rodgers & Hart, Frank Loesser, Dave Brubeck, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Art Tatum, Thelonius Monk, Bill Evans, Laura Nyro, Carole King, Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach, Steely Dan, Tears for Fears, James Newton Howard, Alan Silvestri, Leonard Bernstein
I moved to Nashville in 1999, ostensibly to get songs published. I had a single song published in 2000 called "Till I Feel Like Me," recorded by a little-known artist named Roxie Barton, who disappeared almost as quickly as the song did. I'm lousy at self-promotion, and after spending a couple of years playing guitar and singing at open mikes and writer's nights, I stopped bothering.
I'm a multi-instrumentalist—piano, guitar and percussion. I have a considerable number of unpublished tunes of a country and/or pop nature. One of my favorites is "Voicemail," which was recorded in Chicago shortly before I moved to Music City. Every sound and vocal on "Voicemail" is mine, except for the lead guitar, a rather tasty Clapton-esque solo provided by Rob Byrd, who also engineered the six-song sessions.
Those "Byrd" sessions were exceedingly interesting experiments in the melding together of both digital and analog recording. Backing tracks were recorded and mixed down on my Ensoniq KS-32. Then I lugged the recorder into Rob's home studio, connected it to his Pro Tools set-up, and with the push of a button laid down multiple tracks at once. Then the guitars (my electric-acoustic Ovation 12-string and his electric) were added live. Then I followed up with the live vocals. It's called recording on a budget, and since Rob was new with his recording gear at the time, he charged me relatively little per track. Meanwhile, I saved all that studio time by laying down and recording and mixing the backing tracks on my own under a set of headphones. "She Used to Like Girls" is another favorite from those sessions, a rather whimsical fable based in truth on something that happened to me during a four-year stretch I did as a cab driver. It's a real novelty tune, I guess, and remains unpublished, but I'm firmly convinced of its energy and potted POV. If you don't laugh, then you're probably not listening hard enough. Again, all instruments and voice are mine, even the digital steel guitar. "We're Through" also hails from those sessions. It's a fairly interesting minor-key up-tempo tune, and I do my first ever 12-string-guitar lead in the break.
The plain fact is that I am most proficient on the piano and actually do a great deal of composing in a pop, light jazz, movie- and incidental-music vein. The piano-solo tracks on this page are recent or older compositions of that nature. I've done musical direction for theatrical revues, played cocktail piano, accompanied singers, and spent three years in the mid-1990s as a musical director for the famed comedy theater Second City in Chicago. These days I've been playing comedy piano with Improv Nashville.
I work as a journalist to pay the bills, but otherwise you can find me in my Hillsboro/Belmont condo living room continuing to compose, play, arrange and record on the Ensoniq. My recording technique continues to be budget-inspired: Once tracks are all mixed down and ready to go, I simply hook my board up to a Phillips CD burner via the analog connections. Again, with the push of a button, the tracks are instantly dropped directly to a CD. It's a surprisingly clean transfer. I then upload the CD to my Mac, on to iTunes, convert it to mp3, and—Voila!—out to the world at large.
Since I work in various styles, I couldn't really zero in on a category for this page, so settled for "Other." I'll be rotating my songs, vocal and instrumental, to keep things interesting. Hope you like what you hear. And thanks for listening.
Are you stressed out? When is the last time you had a good belly laugh? If you're in need of some comedic stress relief, please come to our show this Saturday night. Details are on our profile.
