Like many artists –music became my solace and my hiding place early in my life. I was nine or so, when the local symphony came to school and gave us a demonstration of the different instruments WE could choose to play. Well, being somewhat short and tad pudgy, painfully shy among my peers (not adults – though – I figured out early that the adults KNEW stuff the kids didn’t, and a bit of an outsider (mama’s
boy, too sensitive for my own good, and interested in reading and hanging with the dog rather than sports like my brothers), -- I OF COURSE picked the TUBA! – -- NOT ONLY could I hide behind it but it was BIG and LOUD and STUCK out in a way that I couldn’t. I lugged that thing back and forth to school for years ( I actually played all through college and it was through that instrument that my friends Ken & Lisa met and married ).
At about the same time we started doing the kiddie school plays and I also got to be the NARRATOR in "Peter and the Wolf" and Santa Claus to Anna Maria Blasetti’s Mrs. Claus (both our moms could sew!) and I was hooked somehow!
BUT – one day someone let me sing a solo (I think it was at church) and people applauded – and THAT’s WHEN I KNEW I could create something that helped not only myself but those of you who are experiencing life alongside me.
Believe me, it’s taken a LIFE TIME of practice and soul searching, anger, joy, love, frustration, grief and every other emotion, feeling, experience you can imagine to get to HERE. The knowing this is how I can HELP – this is what I can SHARE – this is how I can HEAL – this is how I can INSPIRE – and mostly – this is where my Soul Thrives and my Joy Lives; on stage in front of just a few or a few thousand, in studio recording, in church feeling spirit all around, or in my living room alone – doing the work – or just singing to sing. That’s how I HEAL when I’m hurting – That’s how I SCREAM when I’m angry, That’s how I LOVE when I’m content, that’s how I GRIEVE when I’m over what “man” does to one another.