I never picked up a guitar until I was out of college. While traveling in Europe I bought an EKO 12-string in Rome, Italy after meeting a street musician named David Rapp Judd from Utah. We traveled to Greece together on a trade–he’d teach me how to play, I’d keep him from starving. We lived in a bamboo hut on a beach in Corfu. We dove and speared octopus, picked figs off the mountainside, and played guitar all day, every day.
The first song I ever wrote was called, “Your Shot’s No Better Than Your Aim,” around the time the movie, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was popular, which explains its western motif. It’s on the One Road CD.
I began writing jingles in the early 1980’s for a small ad agency. That work eventually mushroomed, becoming my full time job for 20 years! Early in that process, I built my first studio (I’ve now built 3) and started my own company. I still hear jingles playing today that I wrote years ago.
I think it’s this way for many musicians: When you go back and listen to songs you’ve written, it feels like a diary. Some things that were true then might not be now. Other things never change. Barbara Kingsolver wrote in Lacuna that books are where we go to be free. I think she would agree, since she’s also a musician, that the same thing is true of music.