About Me
I started playing guitar at about age 15 while growing up in a house full of music. My mother was a classically trained pianist, and my earliest childhood memories are of sitting back and watching/listening to her play the likes of Bach and Mozart and Debussey. Both of my parents were interested in folk music, so I grew up with a steady diet of classical music plus Peter, Paul and Mary, The Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and the like.
My parents frowned on jazz and rock, and so it wasn't until those precious coming-of-age years, when you painfully confront the concept that your parents might not be right about everything, that I finally discovered those and other genres of music. By then, I was strumming guitar and eager to learn all the chords to all the songs on the radio...which luckily for me usually meant learning 3 chords.
As a youngster, I briefly studied piano and violin, but didn't practice enough to take them very far. When I picked up guitar, I promised myself that I would only play for fun, and would never have to practice as long as I just played...which I did.
Somewhere along the line (while I was busy learning the songbook of Simon & Garfunkel), someone lent me a copy of an album called "Fragile", by a group called "Yes". I must have worn the grooves off of that album before returning it, particularly on the track "Mood For A Day". It's possible I had never been exposed to classical guitar up to that point, and guitarist Steve Howe's song exhibited just what a skilled classical guitarist can do. I was dazzled, and inspired. I made it my goal to play with as much intensity as I could muster, to try to approach the skills that would allow a musician to play like that.
It would be many years, however, before I would feel comfortable moving from player to composer. Time has a way of moving on, as do our lives, and like many people, I was busy with day to day tasks having to do with career and raising a family. But a series of fortunate events would help provide the catalyst toward compositon. I was given the opportunity to play guitar at a party of Yes-fans, and what followed from that was a series of emails and online posts inquiring about whether I had made any recordings. Not yet, I thought, but I set out to do so, first with a used multi-track tape recorder, then with a Roland digital porta-studio, and more lately with a state-of-the-art Pro-Tools studio. And somehow, the act of recording became the act that threw the switch that turned on a new-found ability to compose. Someone once said "music is the drug", and that could not be more true than for me, for I know no better "high", then the one achieved from completing a new recording in my home studio. Well...perhaps a good round of golf is nearly as good, but not better!
Anyway, I hope all that visit this site enjoy the tunes that I put up here. Feedback is welcome, for it hopefully can provide the energy and inspiration for the next tune!
Thanks for visiting!
Matthew
Profile edited with CricketSoda's Myspace Editor
