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’s beautiful melodies and cutting-edge artistic styling led him into a solo career in the indie/pop genre. Aditya formed a successful guitar-driven pop/rock band widely known as Turnstile, and I went the way of the bleeding-heart, solo-acoustic, folk-pop singer-songwriter. We remained friends throughout the growth process and have come together again, along with drummer Randy Guss of Toad the Wet Sprocket, to pioneer the new genre, Indie-folk-pop-rock... But seriously, give it a listen. I think you’ll dig it.