There’s sooo much to say on this page, as they say – there’s a lot to unpack here. Music was my first love. Like all the best romances, it can overwhelm with smoldering eyes, cigarette ashes, sweat-slick skin and mussed makeup, or it can just sit there in the room with you, comfortable, quiet confident it’ll always be there when you call. Or those other times when it does that ‘sitting there staring at you with a semi-freaky blank expression and the unnerving feeling it’s about to go for your jugular’. All those apply.

I’ve been mucking about in DIY studios of some form or another since mid-high-school days when I used a pair of Radio Shack portable cassette recorders to bounce tracks back and forth using nothing but the built-in mics and speakers in a vain attempt to overdub. Instrument-wise, I’m a guitarist first, though not half-bad on bass and I -love- screwing around with synthesizers. Drum kits are alien torture devices that I simply can’t wrap my brain around, so I’ve become a decent-ish writer of drum parts that I let software perform… though in the band settings I’m always in complete awe of the human-types that can not only play a kit, but make it sound easy.

I’ve been writing songs since early high school, and it’s one of my absolute favorite things to do. After so many years I’m finally starting to believe I’m getting ok at it, but that’s definitely for others to judge. There are a lot of pieces of work showcased in all this that are less than perfect, hopefully not too much less that ‘ok’. I debated not including everything, and then decided an archive should speak the whole story.

These projects pretty much go from one end of the spectrum to the other. Each I love for different reasons, but like with anything you tend to have your favorites. Kelp was the first band where not only did we ‘get’ each other, so did the crowds. Possibly the most fun I’ve ever had on stage, and playing off of Jim, Gary, and most importantly, Rena, made me feel like a rock star. The current band, Oh So Luminous, is bringing back that same magic. Mark, Whitney and Ryan have reminded me of why Kelp was so much fun, and our admittedly short run so far (Covid, you bastard!) was exciting enough for bit-chomping to be currently occurring.

Also, relatively recently (like, within the past year) I’ve grown the balls (or lost the common sense god gave a brick) and released my first foray into ‘solo albums’ which you can read much more extensively about here. I can’t sing for love nor money, but what the hey, I love every one of these songs and two album’s worth of ’em kept me sane at the beginning of the 2020 lockdown – so I’m a strong proponent of ‘music therapy’.

There’s also another side of my muse-ish meanderings. I’m a -huge- synth-head. I’ve been enamored of electronic music ever since hearing Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene” back in college, and have been ever in the pursuit of playing with those toys. One result is a 30-year-long, 50-song/5 album ‘story’ I’ve dubbed “The Story So Far”, that will be finally finished and the last chapter released early March of 2021.

All that being said, it’s made it a little hard to figure out how to order the, er, order of everything herein. So, since we’re talking about music, I figured I’d start with four videos. ‘Cause you probably didn’t see that coming.

First – “Oh So Luminous – You Move Me (Quarantine-style)” in which the band does a live performance from three different cities:

Second – from the second of my ‘two albums written in five weeks during lockdown’ at the beginning of the 2020 lockdown, “Vibration (All These Days)”

Third – the old band, Kelp, did a benefit festival our drummer set up after we had officially broken up a couple years prior. The practice sessions for that show were so much fun that we decided to drag all the gear over to my living room and spend one weekend recording as much as we could before Rena went back up to Detroit and Gary went home to Columbus. This rehearsal generated “Dead Band Walking“, which I am still unreasonably proud of. 🙂

And last but not least, the synth-stuff gets a little love of it’s own. The final “Story So Far” album had a song that was just itching (possibly biting and scratching as well) for a companion film, so a little diving into seeing if I could do a stop-motion film on a whim ended up producing this monstrosity. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

All right. Now that all that’s over with, on to the project list. Each section is in order of the most recent to the most old-ish. I’ll be fleshing out pages for those that aren’t as well documented as time allows.

One thing I think I should comment on – you’ll see the song “Building a Bridge” represented about a billion times in these projects. I feel I should explain that. I had one of those ‘artist moments of purest angst’ one night after having a couple months of writing nothing but the most exquisite garbage. Couldn’t get the words right, the music itself was sucking, my playing was meh at best, and I kind of threw out to the universe an ultimatum of ‘ok, I’m going to try this once more and if it doesn’t work I’m giving up’. Horribly overdramatic, but I was in a very weird place at the time. So I started writing, and “Building a Bridge” fell out of my head.

I was honestly startled by it – and a couple years later when we had formed Collins Gate and recorded it, it felt really good to me. That CD was never commercially released, we just burned a bunch of copies and sent them around. Local station WVXU used to have a show called “Audiosyncrasies” dedicated to a more eclectic swath of music, so we sent them a copy just to get some feedback. All of a sudden they were playing the song in relatively heavy rotation…and we had zero ways to do anything with that fact. It was kind of like our hit without any way to support it, so it kept popping up in future projects as a potential ‘hit’. I suppose if Yes can release 800 versions of “Roundabout”, we were still way below that curve, but I’ll admit, it was a bit weird to keep rehashing it.

ANYWAY… If you’re impatient, here’s a smattering of my favorites from over the years of doing all this nonsense in no particular order, sort of a ‘best of’ collection. I still encourage you to check out each bit below, as I talk in more detail about each project on their respective pages as well as tossing all the music up for perusal.

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Oh So Luminous

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Kelp

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Kid Jupiter

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Staring at the Sea

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Collins Gate

The band that started the obsessions, Collins Gate. A modest juggernaut that sometimes made pure unadulterated magic, and sometimes didn’t… but the amount of love in the band and the amount I personally learned from it can never be understated. Strange prog-folk prestidigitation, to be sure, with Jeff Bentle, Joyce Bentle, Deb Giarratana, Jeff Goins, Annie Winslow, Jay Nungesser and myself.

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Fighting Inertia

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“The Story So Far”

A collection of five instrumental albums spanning 30 years that tells an epic story of unexpected discovery and the consequences of such things, in a setting somewhere between Tolkien and Asimov.

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