About Me
For many years I worked closely with Grammy award winner Van Hunt. Together we wrote dozens of songs. As a multi-instrumentalist and associate producer I was intimately involved with the direction of the music. There were numerous opportunities to learn and grow along side many talented people. Among those was American Idol’s Randy Jackson who manages Van Hunt and equally served as teacher, mentor, and friend.For the touring band, I gladly took the positions of music director and bassist. We toured extensively throughout the United States and Europe sharing the stage with many critically acclaimed artists such as Seal, Mary J. Blige, Kanye West, Coldplay, Al Green, The Roots, Angie Stone, and many others. We performed on a wide variety of television shows including Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Ellen Degeneres Show, MTV, VH1, BET, Soul Train, and The Tavis Smiley Show, just to name a few.My time on the road gave me the opportunity to write even more and I began to collect quite a catalog of material. By the time we finished recording Van’s sophomore album I knew it was time to begin a journey on my own.Disregarding any uncertainty, I dove in headfirst, anxious to bring the songs and ideas to life. I immediately turned my living room into a make shift recording studio littered with guitars, basses, keyboards, drums, and amplifiers. By day I worked as a carpenter and by night I wrote about the day’s stories. When I found one that refused to be ignored, I pressed record.Weekends were spent pouring over newspapers with a pot of coffee. Evenings were spent loathing the news anchors as they casually reported on everything from war to weddings. It wasn’t long before the melodies in my head were invaded by their cast of characters. It was always a sordid mix of love, politics, and moral fatigue.Songs came to me from all directions. Whether it was from experiences of the past or the mood of the day, I drew from a wide variety of influences.I remembered when I was just a little boy around four or five. Sitting on the floor behind my father’s old Sears & Roebuck amplifier, I would watch the orange vacuum tubes glow brightly in the dim light of the living room. I'd place my hand on the amp to feel the heat and the vibration of his Silvertone guitar coming through the speakers. I can still look up and see my father’s contorted face as he hummed and moaned his way through a verse of “Nearer My God To Theeâ€. He was lost in the music and I was too. That’s when it first hit me…the power of it all, a guitar against a voice, a voice against space, and space against the words. It was the feeling of despair in the blues, the truth in gospel, the reality of the day that is so often found woven throughout soul and country music. I was much too young to understand these things then. All I knew was that it just felt good.This project is simply an honest attempt to go back to that place.
