I am a mechanical engineer and I occupy my free time by writing music and painting. I received my bachelors degree from UW-Madison in 2000. I started playing guitar in high school. My early musical influences were definitely metal. Bands like Megadeth, Metallica, and Iron Maiden dominated my cassette collection. I taught myself guitar by learning songs by these and other bands.

After college I decided I wanted to start writing music which meant I needed to understand music and the guitar more. Although I did play the saxophone in grade school, I did not really understnad music theory. So I spent some time online learning basic music theory and began writing The Suffering. My musical influences at that time were mostly power metal bands such as Iced Earth and Nevermore but I had begun to develop and interest in doom metal.

My next album, The Dreamer, was a step back to the basics of songwriting. This was actually what I had planned for my first album but it kind of got out of hand. The Dreamer is an almost entirely acoustic album with simpler song structures. At this point in my life I had become influenced almost entirely by darker metal and indie bands such as The Gathering, Katatonia, and Opeth.

The most recent album God is Dead is a culmination of what I learned on the previous two albums. The song structures are much more complex than on the previous two albums. It combines acoustic and electric guitars in almost equal amounts while combining death metal and clean vocals. Previously named bands remain an influence however I begun to draw song structure influence from bands such as Sigur Ros, Agalloch, and maudlin of the Well.

Anethema, Sigur Ros, The Gathering, Novembers Doom, Antimatter, Katatonia, Opeth, Moonspell, maudlin of the Well