Q: Hey, can you tell us a bit about where you come from, and what made you want to start a career in music?
A: I grew up in Austin, Texas in the 1960s and 1970s. I was kind of born into a, full on, rock and roll record collection. My sister was 11 years older than I was the year I was born. I loved 45 rpm records. I have a near photographic memory. Long before I could read, I could pull any requested song from a stack of a 100 45’s. I could visually use the wear pattern on the labels and grooves in the vinyl to discern which records were which, even though many artists and songs were on the same labels. I was infatuated with the art form. I wanted to make 45’s someday. As I grew older, I really fancied being a disc jockey. I had a toy broadcast set that would allow me to create my own radio shows and broadcast them on the many radios tuned to my station throughout our home. I think like almost everyone my age, The Beatles were what really started the idea of a musical career.
Q: And what other artists have you found yourself listening to lately?
A: I’ve been also producing a young artist named RYAN. His music is not dissimilar to mine and so I’ve been really digging what we’ve come up with together. I have my good old “go to’s.” It might be some old British Invasion stuff, or Gregg Allman or Van Morrison or Neil Young even. Art Garfunkel/Jimmy Webb. Early Bowie. I really like the craft of quality song smithing. But I might put on something silly from when I was a kid that moves me like….Hanky Panky or Louie Louie or Wooly Bully. I really like “Now and Then” by the Beatles. I don’t listen to a lot of music outside of my own because I don’t want to be too influenced by anything I hear, and have it drift into what I’m working on. Also, I think, like a lot of folks my age, the pursuit of newer music is difficult because of the technology and the huge amount of product out there now. I’m trying to give them somewhere to go with what I’m creating.
Q: Who were your first and strongest musical influences?
A: Well, the first record I ever remember hearing was Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry. I played with Chuck and he signed my original copy from the year I was born. I loved pre-Beatles stuff. Everly’s, Ricky Nelson, Little Richard, Doo-Wop, Dion, early girl groups…Spector. After that Beatles, early Stones, all manner of British Invasion stuff. I loved Stax and Motown and Atlantic Soul. I have a real r&b side. I got into singer songwriters like Stills, and Young. Joni Mitchell. Van Morrison, Todd Rundgren. I like a lot of Don Henley’s solo work. I got into English progressive blues rock. The stuff post British Invasion, like Free. Free are huge in my book of influences. I loved early Tull, Moody Blues, Small Faces, Spooky Tooth. It’s pretty broad really.
Q: You have just released your new album ‘Across The Stars’. Is there a story behind it?
A: Across the Stars was the second song I ever wrote. It became the title track after a suggestion from a noted industry person. That song is about life questing really….finding your way beyond the mundane. It’s a metaphor for a Scottish Highland Trek motif. The riff has that kind of celtic vibe. I was channeling something. hahah. The album is a group of ideas about life experience. So many artists begin to write when they are very young and it’s all about what is going to happen and what they are looking toward. I didn’t really start writing until I was say…45 years old and most of these songs were written in my late 50s early 60s. It’s more of a looking back at what happened, what that means, and how you deal with it. By the time mosts writers get there, they’re spent. It’s fresh juice for me. It puts me in a unique position I think.
Q: What is the message behind your music?
A: Like great literature, I hope to present things that make people feel like they belong. That was what was so stunning to me when I started getting into serious literature in High School. I was kind of a lost kid and fairly robotic. I had a lot of things germinating inside of me but none of my perspectives seemed to resonate with my peers, really. In exploring great fiction I found a universality of experience that really gave birth to an entirely different person than I was headed toward being. For me lyrics are the vehicle. So, hopefully, people will find things in my words that make them feel like their experiences are not so foreign.
Q: What do you feel are the key elements in your music that should resonate with listeners, and how would you personally describe your sound?
A: I grew up and began recording in what I would call the “golden age” of popular music production. The deterioration of the “business” due to technology has really often times, cheapened the quality of what is out there in my opinion. I wanted to make a record that was on par with the great records that I cherished as a young artist. To do that the production had to be organic. Not dated, but yet with that grandeur that I expected to be turned on by when I was younger. I needed top players and arrangements to augment the song ideas that I had arrived at. I think we achieved that with “Across the Stars.”
Q: Do you feel that your music is giving you back just as much fulfillment as the amount of work you are putting into it, or are you expecting something more?
A: No one can describe the experience of hearing your work come to fruition…hearing that huge play back of your own creation come through the monitors. I have made quite a few big records with others, so I’m not naive to studio realizations, but after being behind the scenes for so long without any material of my own written or recorded, to hear my own songs like that is an amazing experience. Getting incredibly positive responses to the finished work from other people who I have worked with during my career is also extremely gratifying. I hope to get the music more out front in the public eye and reach that bigger audience. I’ve not had any negative responses as of yet, so my feeling is, it’s really just exposure. If I can get the music heard it will bring more success on all levels.
Q: Could you describe your creative processes? How do usually start, and go about shaping ideas into a completed song?
A: My friend Vince Mariani, taught me a lot about writing and publishing. “Song” is legally, lyric and melody only, in a vocal piece. I write a LOT of my songs a cappella at first, and then add the accompaniment later. I feel I need to be able to sing it a cappella and have it stand. Otherwise, it’s not strong enough probably. So that is often how it begins. Maybe I have a line around for a while. I play with things to go around it. Sometimes it takes years. I had the line “everybody’s gonna let you down” around for a decade before the rest of the song wrote itself one afternoon in 20 minutes. Sometimes it’s a little chord form that starts things off. That was how “Across the Stars” happened. That little musical figure that opens…showed up on a friend’s guitar during a break in a session. I took the guitar home and finished a verse and refrain. That took another year or so to get completed. Sometimes I’ll just write while traveling. Walking around somewhere working out the lyrics and melody. I finished a song last year for my next album. It’s called “The Scrap Book.” I wrote the chorus walking around in Central Park in November of 2019 just before Covid hit.
Q: What has been the most difficult thing you’ve had to endure in your life or music career so far?
A: I was the original drummer in the four-piece band named Christopher Cross. Having that band identity lifted from us and turned into a solo artist and being cut out of the financial successes of that record has been a definite dark cloud that hangs over me a lot.
Q: On the contrary, what would you consider a successful, proud or significant point in your life or music career so far?
A: I would have to say having Michael Omartian think so highly of my music and having him be so genuinely enthusiastic about being involved in the production of my work. I mean…how huge is that? The man sold over 350 MILLION hard copy albums in his career as either a writer, producer, or performer or a combination of those. He’s one of the most accoladed people in the pop music industry over five decades.
