If you've arrived here then you want to know all about me. Well TOUGH.
Just kidding. I love talking about myself. It's one of my 3 favorite things to do. I'll try and keep this on music mostly.
I started stealing my Dad's LPs when I was too small to reach the top of the record player because he put it on a table. This made for a somewhat strange sitruation in which I would steal his LPs and then have to give them back so he could play them for me. It was a game from which I rarely tired, although he was not nearly as keen. Eventually he even bought me my own LP and it was... wait for it... the theme song to GHOSTBUSTERS!! What makes that ironic is that I never really liked the movie very much. My sister got one with Walking in the Air from The Snowman. Frankly, I was a big fan of them both.
Once I grown enough to reach the LP player by myself (and for my Dad to trust me to play his LPs... kind of, anyway) I began to listen to all the classics. We had The Police, ABBA, Steeleye Span, Def Leppard and similar eclectic selections, all of which graced my young ears at some point. Music and me were fine strong friends.
However, despite my parents best efforts to get me to play music I would not. Many years of piano and guitar lessons were wasted (or so they thought) until my parents bought an electric keyboard for my sister, which I promptly stole and played. Soon afterwards I discovered that our boom box had a built-in microphone and I began to record myself. Fortunately, both for my self-respect and for the future in music in general, those tapes have been lost. Hopefully they have been terribly burned in some landfill. They were awful, but we all have to start somewhere. I believe the first song was a cover of Jon and Vangelis' "I'll Find My Way Home" which basically consisted of me and a friend turning the record up very loudly and singing over the top of it. I was very proud.
Shortly after discovering the joys of writing and recording my own songs using the sounds from a cheap Yahama keyboard I also discovered girls, which I found significantly more interesting. All attempts at becoming a rockstar were put on temporary hold.
Fast forward a number of years and I moved from my home in England to Maryland, USA. In celebration of the move, and because when you're a teenager you do angsty things, I bought my second guitar. I learned to play it this time, partly because I was older and more mature, but mostly because I had discovered Bon Jovi and a way to link music to girls, via a guitar. For once in my life I was very serious about learning something and learn it I did, with the help of a few high school friends, a few books, and a large number of websites.
I was so serious about learning it that when I heard Bryan Adams sing the classic line "played it 'til my fingers bled," I decided that's what I should do, because apparently thats what rockstars did. So, I played it till my fingers bled. It took a whole weekend of almost straight playing, but I managed it. When I finally put my guitar down I couldn't press a string for two days because the bruises on my fingers were so painful. Needless to say, I was not happy with Bryan Adams for romanticizing the idea in the first place.
Unfortunately, later years did not bring wisdom. I went through all the usual phases of guitar playing and songwriting, including the "I'm so brilliant I should get hired right now" phase (usually when you've never played a note outside your bedroom, but you nailed that Led Zepplin riff), the "How can I be so terrible at this?" (which happens right after you screw up that Led Zepplin riff in front of someone you really respect as a musician), the "I'm terrified" phase (which happens RIGHT before you go on stage for the first time and makes you wonder whether this is God paying you back for all the times you skipped church to play guitar) and the "Hey, this can get me laid" phase (which happens right after you come off stage and are approached by numerous fantastic looking women).
As a songwriter I went through several phases as well, including the "this song is the next number 1" phase (which happens after finishing pretty much every song I've ever written), the "this song is fabulous, I'm just misunderstood" phase (which happens after the song you thought was going to be the next number 1 is an epic fail in front of the first audience you play it for), the "I could make millions in this business" phase (when you find out what a writer made from their hit song) and the "how the fuck will this pay the bills" phase (which happens when you've spend six months trying to get a song cut and have had no response whatsoever).
These days I have a real day job in a real office. I write, record and play on the side. I graduated from the school of rockstardom to find that real life is significantly more expensive than Ramen Noodles and I would need something else to pay the bills. After all my years of playing, recording and gigging I have a following of at least three people.
I would like to dedicate everything written here to my loving parents, fiancee (soon to be wife) and sister who have tirelessly avoided judging me for my many flights of fancy designed to channel my overactive imagination whenever I have put down the guitar, and put up with the tuneless nonsense I call songs whenever I pick it up.
