"When I was 17 a friend of my Mom's loaned me a 4-track, I think I got to use it for 2 weeks. Absolutely pivotal! I lived and breathed the 4-track. That's when I really started understanding what was possible, with all that layering.

It took me years to accumulate enough equipment to start doing things. I was always thinking of music and how to get the equipment to record the music. I still am mostly thinking about that. At some point I realized I needed to learn the guitar, and then the bass. So it's been years of craft-development."

My parents are both classical pianists, so music bled through every crack of my universe. I fell asleep to it every night and heard it all day and loved it but didn't realize it was anything special. The record collection at our house was all classical and jazz except for Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles 1967-1970 . My brother and sister and I used to run and jump and scream around the house listening to the Beatles. They were a special treat, the musical equivalent of getting to have pizza for dinner. We loved them. And I continued to cherish the Beatles and heard no other pop until I was 10 or 11 and got my own radio.

Inevitably, I took piano lessons. I was a terrible student and couldn't read music, but I loved to tinker and make things up. My practicing sessions would usually devolve into me just fooling around, exploring, playing melodies that pleased my cat, who would nuzzle up to me on the bench and purr enthusiastically whenever I played something pretty.

I remember knowing when I was 10 that I wanted to do what the Beatles did. Every Saturday morning I listened to Casey Kasem's top 40 and wrote down all the songs and considered which ones I thought were worthy and which ones I thought were below my own level of future potential. It seemed so easy to write a song. When I stayed home sick from school I would listen to the radio and write down all the names of the songs they played and rate them and luxuriate in my opinions about each of them.

There was nothing like falling in love with a song, dying to hear it again, having to wait for it to come on the radio because there was no such thing as downloading and I was too young to have money or transportation to buy music. And when I hated a song that was wildly popular I was full of outrage at people's poor taste.

When I was 17 a friend of my Mom's loaned me a 4-track. I think I got to use it for 2 weeks. Absolutely pivotal! I lived and breathed the 4-track. That's when I really started understanding what was possible, with all that layering. It took me years to accumulate enough equipment to start doing things. I was always thinking of music and how to get the equipment to record the music. I still am mostly thinking about that. At some point I realized I needed to learn the guitar, and then the bass. So it's been years of craft-development.

Eventually I had enough skill to start writing and producing music for children's cd-rom games, and now I make a living doing music for commercials. It's fine as long as I can pay the bills and still have time to write and record songs

I'm currently hacking away at my 3rd cd. It's taking forever because of crashing computers and making a living, and a dash of perfectionism. This one will include lots of collaborations with a lyricist who teaches poetry at Ohio State. His name is Stuart Lishan and he has inspired me. I find myself writing stuff that I wouldn't otherwise have written. It's my first time to collaborate. It's a clear cut collaboration: he writes the words, I write the music. His words lend themselves well to music. Often the music just pops out instantly. It's much easier for me not to have to write words, but I'm still writing my own words for certain songs. I'm a slow word writer!

I did the last two cds alone except for drums, which were done by Chris Searles. He glued it all together with his brilliance. He's a genius.

Instruments: Fender Strat, Fender P-Bass, 1966 Super Reverb Amp, Yamaha S80 synth, Piano, Drums, voice (mine).

Recording: G4 'Sawtooth', Pro Tools MixPlus, Neumann TLM 193, SM57. The drums were recorded on”2" using all kinds of mics. The Pro Tools stuff was dumped onto the “2" and everything was mixed off of the “2"