My Story
I fell in love with music early on listening to the records my parents spun of their favorites in our home in New Hampshire where we moved from my birthplace of Winter Haven, Florida. My mother always had something playing on the turntable. My father played the spoons and the bones on his knees to whatever record she had put on and could yodel pretty darn good. My sister, who was 4 years older than me, sang all through school and on the other side of my bedroom wall too.
I was 7 or 8 when my stepfather, who played guitar and piano, came into my life. I fell in love with his acoustic guitar which he’d play at night to my Mom on the porch and let me play sometimes while teaching me some chords. It was a big deal for me.
I was around 12 when I started taking the melodies I’d make up and the beats I would play on my lap and began recording them. Since I didn’t have any blank tapes, I’d stuff tiny balls of paper in the holes at the top of the tapes I had of other artists so that when I’d press “play” and “record” at the same time, it would actually record! It was awesome! (Sorry, Bon Jovi, Fat Boys, Twisted Sister and many others.)
That’s when I really got the songwriting bug in me. Now I could actually record my own stuff and overdub – layering tracks – because there were two tape slots. I’d record the beat on one tape and played that through the speakers while recording my vocals on the other tape deck. I was stoked and that was all I needed at the time— my guitar came way later.
I recorded years of off-the-cuff stuff into my duct-taped Kmart microphone just trying to find my own voice and any good tones. On my 21st birthday, my stepfather bought me my own acoustic guitar!
Fast forward some years later of trying to write good songs, a few bands, some sweaty-palmed karaoke nights, and a lot of moving experience from living in different states, I found myself in the fast lane with my Miami band opening up for big acts, being escorted to VIP tables and driven to afterparties that got bigger than the shows. I knew if things kept going that way, I’d be another cliché dead-at-the-back-of-the-bus rock star and who knows who I could’ve taken with me on the way out ‘cause I wasn’t doing anyone any favors when I got off stage. Bottom line, I was burning the candle at both ends and lost my voice a couple times which was pretty scary being that singing was the one thing I felt I did better than anything else.
That’s when I went straight to Green tea, got back into jogging, started eating better, and going to church because I wanted to do more with my writing and singing than what I was.
I walked away from that band a day prior to a showcase for a music label because my bandmates weren’t going to change and I knew I couldn’t make them. I started rounding up coffee shops to play at and calling churches and began performing again. Specials, festivals, art shows, benefits to raise awareness for cancer victims, events at schools for troubled teens. I was even the VBS (Vacation Bible School) Music Director for a church in Miami Springs in 2006. I was up for performing anything that was for a good cause.
This went on for a few years. Then, going through a divorce put me in a position where I felt my writing was too dark for the church and too light for the clubs. I wanted to start over so I went to L.A. and, after a couple months of struggling to get established there, I found myself sleeping off the beaten path of the streets of Santa Monica.
This is where I met a kind stranger on the beach whose advice I took to reconnect with my family back in New England by boarding a Greyhound bus funded by a City program for relocating the homeless. After five days of numerous stops and vending machine dining, I was back to my stomping grounds of Manchester, New Hampshire to take a minute.
Throughout my life, the closer I got to finding who I really was, the less I identified with who I’d been. Fast forward a couple more years and I find my now-wife who I have a beautiful family with and start writing, inspired by my journey, the people I met along the way, and the life lessons and experience gained on it. These are the songs on my new album currently in the works titled A Lover Still.
I believe that remaining a lover through life’s ups and downs and the ins and outs of our relationships and our own personal growth is the most important thing that we could ever do. Period.
My mission is to let you know that wherever you are in life and whatever you’re going through… you are not alone. Through our backgrounds, stories, similarities, differences, pains, triumphs and pursuits, I’m inspired by all the beauty in the world and in you.
I write into my songs notes of hope, melodies of encouragement, and honest lyrics through chords I find on my acoustic guitar to reach you where you are right now. I’m aiming at your heart and trying to convey love through my songs to all of you – my brothers and sisters everywhere. We are not alone. Even when we find ourselves by ourselves, there is someone somewhere going through exactly what we are and the whole spiritual realm of light is right here with us too… always.
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Note: I’m grateful to have made it through being a troubled teen, saddened by the world because of how I saw myself and others being treated in it… to miraculously having music find me, to it becoming an outlet for me and the pain and love I have inside and to utilize it in a positive way to encourage you to keep walking faithfully forward in your life.
One day you’re going to walk right into your purpose and find yourself extremely grateful because you made it through the darkness that threatened to steal the joy and the love inside of you that you were born with. You will be grateful to have built up in you the strength, boldness, confidence and good character from a life of withstanding storms with humility, kindness and a fierce drive to persevere through everything life throws at you so that you can show up in life ready to help someone else find some piece of the puzzle they are missing in their life with some of the knowledge and wisdom you have acquired on your journey because you have held on to the love in your heart.
I believe there is good in everyone and the potential to obtain whatever one’s heart desires. I believe we all have the equal opportunity to find what moves us into loving action that can ultimately make the world better by doing it. I humbly and boldly ask you now to search yourself for what you are made of. I hope the best for you and I also hope that you choose to remain a lover still.