As much as I'd like to, I don't think I can pull off an entire page full of biography in the third person.  I've visited enough musicians' websites to know that practically nobody has a retinue of publicists following them around to create a press-ready bio, and yet the convention seems to be to pretend that someone else is writing it.  I don't think anybody buys it; I'd rather not even try.  Still, having to ghost-write my own biography--even if it's obviously me writing--makes me uncharacteristically bashful, so I'll stick to the facts.  

I've been writing songs since I was 13.  That's a really long time, because I was 13 in 1985.

I've sung in choirs, with a capella groups, and with rock bands of various genres and configurations.  I've played cello with orchestras and string quartets.  I've been the piano player and music director for theater productions.  And I've been the acoustic-guitar-toting singer-songwriter in more venues than I'd care to remember.

In 1995, I recorded a CD of original songs called "This Disregard for Distance," with the help of a bunch of friends and my meager savings.  When it was done I sold it to everyone I knew.  I sold it to everyone I met.  I sold it to anyone who made eye contact with me when I performed in public.   But I wasn't exactly sure what to do after that.  And so after some modest disappointments and soul-searching, my creative output slowed to a trickle and then dried up altogether.
 
A few years passed.  Then, at the end of 2008, in the quiet period between Christmas and New Years, out of nowhere, the chorus to a song came into my head, unbidden.  So I wrote it down and finished it.  One song became two.  Then four.  Since then, I've written dozens and dozens of songs (really!), with even more fragments flying around my head.

My recent songs aren't (I hope) consciously or unconsciously derivative, but they do draw on features common to songwriters I admire: the short-story-like compositions of Richard Shindell; the spiritual truths of David Wilcox; the unreliable narrators of writers like Randy Newman.  The songs are varied in subject and style, but I'm finding myself drawn to writing from the point of view of characters other than myself, which I find liberating.  I'm especially interested in characters at decisive and emotionally charged moments in their lives: like the soon-to-be-abandoned adulterous lover in "the James Goodwill," or the defensive and conflicted parent in "He was Loved."

I'm refining some of the more promising songs I've written, recording and re-recording them, and performing them at showcases and songwriters' events around the in the mid-Atlantic region and beyond.   Most recently--I clumped nine promising tunes together, called it "Carry You out of My Sight"..and voila, another album!