THE PRESENT PLAYS is my first album. It's a singer-songwriter album with various bands assembled to lend their varied musical textures to each track. I didn't know this when I got started, but it turns out I've got about 4 or 5 musical moods that kee [+]THE PRESENT PLAYS is my first album. It's a singer-songwriter album with various bands assembled to lend their varied musical textures to each track. I didn't know this when I got started, but it turns out I've got about 4 or 5 musical moods that keep coming back. These genres all seem to fit pretty nicely in the world of "AMERICANA" music, but individual tracks are either bluegrass, folk, country or pop.
Real folk music has always been a part of my life. My parents are both musicians. They met at Vanderbilt and ran "The Marketplace", the only desegregated coffee shop in Nashville back in the 60's. Nashville being Nashville, there were always musicians coming through and my parents got to know a lot of them (including one of my heroes, John Hartford). I was born a decade later and we moved to Arlington, VA for a short time, and then to Austin, TX where my dad earned his PhD in Folklore. My parents always had instruments in the house, and most of our house guests have been musicians for as long as I can remember. So I grew up hearing excellent authentic folk music.
We moved back to Arlington while I was young and I was active in all the music programs at school and church. Music was a big part of my life.
But the 80's was a bad decade for a suburban adolescent to say he liked folk music of any kind. For years I was a "closet" folk fan. I started writing pop songs in the 8th grade, before I could play guitar. My friend Jonathan is (and was) an excellent songwriter and guitarist. He helped me set my earliest lyrics to music. Summers we would busk the METRO until we made enough change to come home. I took up guitar in the 10th grade to play a character in a play.
I continued to play guitar and write songs as a theater major at William & Mary. I played duets for a short time with my friend Lem, another fine singer-songwriter. My favorite groups included U2, Sting, Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega and The Indigo Girls.
I got a job in summer stock theater after my sophomore year and saw a lot of live acoustic music. It was at the Lime Kiln Theater in Lexington, VA, that I "came out", so to speak, as a fan of folk music. After college, I joined the resident company at Lime Kiln and toured with them for three years. We wrote our own scripts and songs to adapt A
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