Okay lets see:
I moved around a lot when I was a child and music had always been a constant. I would write poems and lyrics and hum my little ditty's to myself to deal with the marginalization one can feel as a minority. Basically no matter what community I was in - I never fit in. I figured, hey, if I'm gonna be different may as well go ALL the way. I listened to a lot of metal (Metallica, Pantera, Ministry were some of my favorites), and when grunge came there was no other band for me but Alice in Chains! (and for a Black chick born into a West Indian family, that was rough).
I ended up at an alternative high school in Boston, the town where I was born, and I took a lot of college courses. During that time I won a scholarship through the Handel and Haydn Society to study classical voice and some music theory at The New England Conservatory of Music which lasted until I completed High School. I even studied voice and jazz theory at Berklee College of Music just to mix it up a bit.
Soon, I caught the acting bug and went on to receive my B.F.A from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Undergraduate Drama. Upon graduation I got annoyed with the lack of good work out there for someone like me and my friends who enjoyed singing/acting/dancing: musical theater! So naturally, I figured I'd write some musicals. I auditioned for and won a slot in the highly competitive Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop at BMI in New York City. I was there as a lyricist for two years in this workshop and developed my musical 'Live Nude Girls Unite!' with composer Karl Mansfield.
Still feeling the need to perform, I decided to move out to Los Angeles. I auditioned a bunch - was in a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video - and I also wrote another play, 'Junior's Black Hole' when I won a scholarship to attend the David Henry Hwang Writer's Institute at The East West Players. I bought a keyboard hoping to one day learn how to play it well - and for my first two years I lived here in LA, I never touched it.
It was funny, with all the time I spent loving music, writing songs, loving performance - never did I think to sit down and perform my own songs on that keyboard.
FINALLY in January 2007, I was listening to Mother Love Bone's "Crown of Thorns" and got inspired. I figured I could play the piano part since I've heard it so much, and I did just that. Then I figured, if I could hear something pre-recorded and play it, why can't I just play my own tunes swimming around in my head...?
So there you have it, self taught keyboard player, trained vocalist, fierce songwriter in training. Soon to take over the world? Yeh, something like that ;-)
Thanks for reading and listening!
