My Story

From Out of Nowhere

A circus performer, an alligator wrestler, helping to advise on future space flights to Mars – if you had asked me ten years ago – heck, even five years ago – I would have told you hands down that any of those pursuits were more likely for me than rock singer/songwriter. The idea of creating music was not even the tiniest blip on my radar.

I’d been a computer programmer since before I graduated from college. It was what I had done my whole adult life. It was what I knew; what I was comfortable with. Somewhat ironically, the road to being a computer guy came from writing, but not songwriting. About a year after I graduated from high school I wrote a novel – a three hundred-something page mystery/drama. I decided it would be really cool to be a novelist, even though that didn’t align one bit with my college path. But a year or so and a few publisher rejection letters later, I decided not to pursue it any further. Besides, by that time I had found something else I could create besides stories – computer games.

As a new programmer, my games were so crude they would make the graphics for old Atari systems look awesome, but they were mine and I loved them. The games led to the creation of programs for assisting with taxes, which led to programs for assisting with financial investments, which eventually led to programs for assisting with healthcare data management. The years passed by. And there were some good times. But slowly and methodically the flame of creativity that led me to computers in the first place was being stomped out. I felt trapped; always flowing in the same direction, following the same expected path. It’s not that I disliked what I was doing or wanted to throw all my computers out the window or something. The pay was fine and everything else about the work was fine too. But I needed something in addition to that. I needed something to relight that flame. And I had no idea what I was looking for or even where to begin searching.

Luckily for me, I had a daughter who developed a love for music at an early age. And over a period of time that love proved to be highly contagious. As I listened to her play the piano and watched her enjoyment grow with each new piece she mastered, I eventually found myself jotting down little phrases on pieces of paper; things I’d think of randomly and that sometimes didn’t even make sense. But the seed had been planted and over the next several months I began to jot down more and more until I had formed writings that bore some very general resemblance to songs. Then I began to experiment with singing my songs and, to my surprise, I found this to be absolutely exhilarating. It was a feeling of being able to craft something out of nothing and make it your own; make it an extension of yourself and what you believed in and what you wanted to say to others. That feeling is what got me hooked. And it was then when I decided, with a secret only I knew, that I was going to become a singer/songwriter who would create songs that could be heard and enjoyed by many, many people.

Cool dream, right? Well, there were just a couple of obstacles that I’d need to work through. One was that I knew absolutely nothing about creating music … or playing music or reading music. I knew zero music theory. Zero piano. Zero guitar or any other instrument. I had no vocal training and no knowledge of songwriting technique.

Oh, and I was over forty years old and had spent the past twenty years as a computer geek.

Everybody knows the mold for aspiring singer/songwriters – they grow up with a guitar in their hands and seek to make a name for themselves as twenty-something year olds; if not teenagers.

Beyond that, I knew nobody in the music industry to point me somewhere and show me what to do.

I was starting from rock bottom as an ancient rookie with no skills, no contacts, and no resemblance of any sort to the stereotypical new singer/songwriter.

The Songs Made Me Do It

There was a movie released in 2018 called Venom. It was largely panned by critics, but I would say that it might be the best way I can think of to describe the reasons why I decided to just dive in headfirst and why I kept moving forward with it – with the ridiculous idea of singing/songwriting – no matter how many roadblocks I hit along the way. In the movie a very average man has an alien life form inhabit his body. Most of the time the man looks and acts as he usually does, but as the movie progresses the man finds himself in situations that seem impossible to handle – fighting a dozen men at once, scaling a skyscraper, and so forth – and the only reason he makes it through is because the alien is prodding him on; imploring him to do things he couldn’t do on his own because he just isn’t strong enough.

It was kind of like that with the songs I wrote that I wanted to share with the world. They were always there inside of me, pushing me forward beyond my normal limits so that they could, just maybe, have a chance to see the light of day. Of course I don’t mean the songs were literally speaking to me or forcing me to do things; I’m not quite that crazy. But the attachment I felt toward them was so strong that, in effect, they were speaking to me. I was their caretaker, their vessel.

Me: I can’t take vocal lessons – I’ve never sung in front of anyone in my life and the other students are all teenagers and young adults.