I was born in Detroit. My family remains there scraping car windows and getting way too excited about “shorts weather.” I got out fast. I left home for Michigan State University to study Advertising -- my folks wouldn't shell out the cash for a music degree despite the fact that dad was in a 60's pop band. There were guitars lying around the house everywhere when I was a kid, but at the time they were nothing more to me than pretend boats. I sank at least 3.
My first real experience with music was in grade-school band, when I was last chair of the saxophone section for 6 years straight. For those of you that weren’t band geeks, that means I sucked. -Consistently. I hated it. Then, sometime in my mid-teen years I decided I wanted to be a singer, but I had no band and no idea how to get one. So I bought a keyboard and wrote songs. It was fun, but as time passed I realized that a keyboard was way too heavy to lug around trying to impress women, so I bought a guitar. Actually, I stole one. From my cousin. He left it at my place in college and I never made the effort to return it. So, I guess I found it? I was instantly addicted and began writing folk songs immediately. They were awful, but I didn’t know it and luckily I had some either very supportive or very stupid friends around to tell me I was great. It was enough to make me keep at it.
After college I moved to Chicago to pursue nothing. I spent two years in that city wasting my time and thinking something big might eventually come out of a terrible little cover band called “Phat Ed and the Skinnies!" I wasn’t fat or phat, but my two band mates, Andy Creighton and Aditya Rao, were very thin, so we thought we had a clever little joke. -That’s exactly what we had, without the clever part. We should have had shame. We eventually gave up on it and all moved to Los Angeles to pursue different musical goals; Andy now fronts the indie/pop band, The World Record ( http://www.theworldrecord.net/ ), Aditya leads a pop/rock group called, The Throws ( http://www.thethrows.net/ ), and I went the way of the bleeding-heart, solo-acoustic, folk-pop singer-songwriter. Here're a few of my tunes. I hope you dig'em.