15% OFF ON TWO SHIRTS (WITH A FREE DUALITY CD!) ALL DECEMBER!!
History
It's been a long and winding road, getting from there to here. From an early age, I was surrounded by music. My folks fed me a steady diet of Tom T. Hall, Charley Pride, Alabama, Eddie Rabbit, and Ronnie Milsap as a kid, and all the grown-ups in my family picked guitar. Those guys must have known every song Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Paycheck ever wrote, and whenever the family got together the guitar always got passed around.
By the time I was old enough to pick up a guitar, I figured I ought to go ahead and learn to play it. I had a great guitar teacher who insisted on teaching me how the Beatles and Led Zeppelin wrote songs, rather than whatever long-haired shredder I was into that week. He also introduced me to the Sex Pistols, the Replacements, and lots of other bands of deviant musicians. The kinds of bands that influenced teenagers do to crazy things. The kinds of bands that parents hated. Great bands, indeed.
By high school I had decided that I was going to make a career out of that old guitar, and was writing songs in punk and metal bands. I started playing in bands around St. Louis. Some great bands back then. The Slanders and Ultrafink. I had my first experience with the road back in those bands. Luckily, we could play big venues in St. Louis so we'd trade shows with bands from Kansas City, Nashville, and Little Rock, hitting up college towns all over the place. Those were some good times.
But like all bands, those bands came and went. I ended up where all musicians seem to end up at one time or another, L.A. Orange County, actually. L.A. was woo expensive, and "the OC" was the scene at that point anyways. More bands, more songs, more touring and touring and touring and touring. One year the band I was in, Half Way Home, was on the road about 9 months. Bigger shows, bigger tours, bigger people to talk to about the band, always on the cusp of something bigger happening.
But those bands, like all bands, came and went, and I woke up one morning pretty sure that I was done writing songs. Pretty sure that I was done getting into bands and then starting new bands when those bands broke up. I went back to Southern Illinois and to school. It wasn't long before I started playing again with some great local guys, but school kept me busy. Before I knew it I had a PhD. in Geography and was teaching college students myself.
But writing songs isn't so easy to quit as you might think. I woke up one day, and realized I'd been writing songs all along, and somehow I had accumulated five or six years worth of disparate parts from unborn songs in my head. Once I started putting these pieces together, I realized that these songs were a weird hybrid of classic country and punk and rock. Between the country my folks introduced to me, the Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt I loved as a kid in the St. Louis scene, and the new "traditional country" singers I was hearing, I was inspired to pick the old guitar up again and see if anyone wanted to listen. And now we're here. I hope you enjoy!