A lot of things from my “youth” shaped me.  When I was really young, my parents gave me a toy piano, and were surprised when I started playing melodies on it by ear.  At 5.  With no musical training.  They enrolled me in a Yamaha method class, which covered the fundamentals of music.  They got me an organ with two octaves, and when I complained that I kept running out of keys, they got me a piano at age 8.  I started piano lessons, which would continue all the way through the end of high school.  As a senior in high school, they enrolled me in the prep department at the Eastman School of Music, where I studied piano and music theory.   It was there that I learned I wasn’t great at music.  I was good by small town standards, but I’d never be great.  Practice bored me.  My fingers could never do a trill on the piano, no matter how long I practiced.  I didn’t have the physical tools.  But I did love music, so perhaps I could work somehow in the music business.

I began high school as a quiet, painfully shy kid, bad at sports, picked on and made fun of.  Music was my escape.  By my senior year I had made progress – I was sort of the class clown, but still no luck with girls, to my deep regret.  But I would meet a wonderful girl in college and marry her.

Side bar – halfway through my senior year of high school, my parents got a computer.  They thought it would help my mentally challenged younger brother learn more things.  I loved the computer – I taught myself MS Basic, which came with the computer, and worked on some primitive games.  But back in 1983, computers were very challenging.  I was bad at math and science.  No way would I ever be able to make a living with a computer.  At best, it might be a fun hobby.

On graduating high school, I decided to go to college for an AAS in Music Merchandising, and then a BS in Music Business, both of which I completed.  I got a job selling home audio equipment and thought about my future, and got married to my college girlfriend, Robin, an elementary teacher.  We had a wonderful honeymoon in Toronto, back when Young Street was in full swing.  I was unsure of my future, but I was happy.  From picked on high school freshman to happy college grad, deeply in love, married, ready to make a path, somehow, together.

If you were a writer, how would you finish my story?  Would I slave away somewhere in music retail and one day write a hit song?  Would my wife and I end up living in Nashville, where I would write music for TV commercials?  Would I end up building guitars for a living, working with my wife’s father (a woodworker?)

Try this one on for size: two weeks after the honeymoon, my wife would be diagnosed with Leukemia, and we would spend the next several years fighting the disease, moving to wherever we had to be, and she’d eventually die.  That’s a shitty ending, right?  That’s exactly what fucking happened.

During the time period when she was ill, I was desperate for a steady job with good hours and benefits.  We moved back in with my wife’s parents and I went back to school to get a BS in Elementary Education.  When I graduated, our plan was to move to Florida, where there were a lot of teaching jobs and some very good weather.  She died during finals week.  After spending three weeks at my parent’s house, mostly curled up in a little ball, I started running as a way to cope.  I got my life back together, went back to college, finished my degree, and moved to Florida alone.

Why didn’t I just go back to my music roots?  Because I’d worked in music retail and I didn’t like it.  At 28 years old, I knew I’d never have a career as a “rock star,” and I had no interest in participating in the music business, because I’d studied sales and marketing and advertising and I didn’t like any of it.  I did give some lessons at various points, but I didn’t like that either.  I had a lot of interest in writing and performing music, but I considered myself a marginal musician (still do) and I didn’t want an unstable jack of all trades musical life, which seemed to be my best other option.  I did, on the other hand, enjoy teaching elementary kids.

I drove to Florida, moved in with my cousin Dave, and did some substitute teaching while working in the record store in the mall (Remember Camelot?  I worked for them.)  I eventually got a job teaching a tough group of discipline problems during my first year.  I got my own apartment.  I had a job, an apartment, a car, and a big empty hole in my core.  Once, at one in the morning, I put on my coat and went for a walk.  I liked to look at the fountains at my apartment complex.  Things were working out badly.  I wasn’t getting the job done at work.  I probably wouldn’t get rehired.  I was seriously depressed.  I put my hand in my coat pocket and there was a 20 dollar bill.  I thought about taking a bottle of sleeping pills.  I thought about how badly that would hurt my friends and my family.  I walked back to my apartment, drank a beer, and went to bed.  I’d later write a song about this night called Twenty Dollars.

Then everything started getting better.

I made it through my bad first year and got rehired.  I started dating a wonderful woman named Holly who would end up becoming my second wife.  I taught four more years, then became a technology coach, and then the person who trained all the technology coaches, and then the main web guy for a very large school district.  I had a talent for computers.  I had a talent for programming.  I’ve spent the past 20 years basically making a living with a computer.  I still suck at math and science.

And I ended up doing the jack of all trades music thing after all.  I write and record my own music – I have four albums on Apple Music/Spotify/etc.  I’ve had a few songs licensed.  I’ve been on TV and the radio.  I’ve done a lot of gigs.  I run a guitar-based website, and I now have a YouTube channel.  But there’s no pressure on any of it, because it’s all a hobby.  My job has good benefits and a good retirement policy.  In seven more years I’ll never have to work again, but I enjoy the work.  The music hobby stuff will still be there, but I’ll have more time to do it.  In ignoring a life in the music business, I’ve been able to do music exactly on my own terms, mostly thanks to technology (GarageBand, the Internet, Logic Pro, YouTube, etc.)

It’s easy to see how it could have gone the other way.  I’m super interested in how guitars work, and my former stepfather was a guy who knew how to use tools – he could build a house or a coffee table.  After I was out of the picture, he ended up making his own guitars.  Had Robin not died, it’s easy to see how we could have become a small guitar company.  And I feel like I would have been doing computer stuff as a hobby.

But I am of the strong opinion that playing “what if” is a dangerously stupid game.  I married my second wife 24 years ago.  We have two college age kids.  We’ve had a wonderful life and I’m close with my wife and kids.  I love my job, I love my family, and I love all the music stuff I’m doing.  If you’d told that 28 year old version of me curled up in a ball that this is how I’d end up, I would have been very happy to hear that.  I also probably wouldn’t have believed it, but it would have been true.

If you read this far, thank you.  I didn’t intend to do a blog post of my life today – I just started typing and it just came out.  My life has been like a movie – good in the beginning, full of promise, down to the bottom of despair in the second act, and a comeback and ultimate win the in third act.  Well, almost – Hollywood I think might have had me writing a hit song in the third act and becoming very successful in the music business.  I’m very happy with how things have turned out.  And I’ve inserted the story of my life into my four albums.  I’ve published about 40 songs, but about 17 of them tell my story.  If you’re interested, here’s a curated list…

Title/Description/Album

  • Cranberry Lake – on being a ten year old kid.  Every Single Day
  • So Do You – about the high school romance that wasn’t.  Every Single Day
  • Long Point Park – about the summer when I graduated high school.  Every Single Day
  • I’ll Be Waiting – I wrote this for my first wife Robin after she got sick.  Never recorded on an album.
  • When I Look At You – same as I’ll Be Waiting.  These two songs only exist in cassette demo form.
  • Still In Love – about losing my first wife.  Florida Songs
  • Pieces on the Ground – fear of rejection when I started dating again.  Florida Songs
  • Confused – an almost relationship that happened when I’d started dating again.  Every Single Day
  • Twenty Dollars – about contemplating suicide.  Every Single Day
  • Can’t Back Down – about moving on with your life.  Florida Songs
  • You Changed My Mind – a love song to my then girlfriend Holly, now my wife.  Florida Songs
  • The Answer – about proposing to Holly.  Florida Songs
  • Unconditionally – the song I wrote specifically for our first dance at our wedding reception.  Never Completely
  • Gotta Have Love – to Holly.  Florida Songs
  • My Love For You – a song I wrote about our kids being born.  Florida Songs
  • It’s Still You and I – a song about our marriage.  Never Completely
  • Passing Through – about visiting the small town where I grew up, and thinking back.  Every Single Day
  • The One Thing – about Holly being the most important person in my life.  The One Thing
  • You Say – how I view our marriage.  The One Thing

The thing about the two songs I’ve never recorded for an album is… one, I’ve never been able to sing them all the way through again.  And two, I didn’t want to dwell on the past – I decided I’d rather mostly write about the upbeat present.  But seeing my life in songs, in the list above, it’s become obvious to me that these are missing events.  There are other moments from my life that also need to be put out into the world.  That seems like a good goal for another album.