I come from flyover country: first Lincoln, Illinois, then Denver, Colorado. Nice locales to grow up in and a lot more interesting than you might think. In fact, I feel like the material for most of the songs I’ve written is culled from those places. But “I never saw my home town ‘til I stayed away too long,” as Tom Waits says, and I only began to take a serious approach to songwriting once I moved to Los Angeles. All the different styles of music I was into finally started to click and melt together until I had something new
that I could call my own – both humorous and serious, both fresh and cliché. LA is also where I met my girlfriend, Amanda. Shortly after that, we hopped on the Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway and headed east for New York City. I’ve been focusing on my skills as a performer over the course of the past year by playing as frequently as possible in the clubs and bars on the Lower East Side. In 2004 I’m planning to release my first “real” album, which I’m calling for now “The Locked Room.”
Often when I tell people I’m an only child they roll their eyes and say, “Oh that explains it. You’ve chosen to be a performer because you’re so used to being the center of attention.” Who am I to offer an objective opinion? All I can say is that, growing up, I generally preferred to be alone. Sometimes alone wasn’t quite alone enough and I would pretend to be someone else floating around inside my own body, paying close attention to what it looked like when the outside-boy shut his eyes, or what his breath sounded like. In my song, “Keep It To Yourself,” I say how “Checkerboard patterns majestically flutter and whisper like moths against spider web grids” in an attempt to describe the pictures I saw when I would close my eyes as a kid – a phenomenon I later learned is called hypnagogic vision and is something everyone experiences. Another thing about me that’s probably not very unique is that I’ve always had a sense of being watched – even when there’s no one else around. Even when I’m alone in my car or in the shower, it seems like I’m not acting naturally, like I’m just performing the part of “me” and just doing the things that “I” would do. When you saw The Truman Show did you feel as if someone had held a movie screen sized mirror up to your face? Well, me too. In a strange way, I think that’s played a part in my decision to begin performing. Being in front of the audience is calming because it replaces the feeling that I’m being observed with the certainty that they’re watching me.
The lyrics for my song "The Dustbowl" have recently been purchased to serve as the forward for a soon to be published anthology of short fiction by authors inspired by the work of the late, great Warren Zevon
