Hello, and thanks for checking out my page here!! Let's dive right in, shall we? This is my first album of original material in over ten years. The music that I've written for this album is catchy and hook-filled and the lyrics are my most emotionally revealing yet! But, why the decade-long gap?? About ten years ago, after years of hoping, my wife got pregnant. And, of course, we were overjoyed. Then a couple of months later, we found out that she would be having twins. And we were doubly overjoyed! At the time, I was in a couple of bands -- you know playing out here and there -- and I had just started working on my ninth album of original material. Then one morning, my wife told me that something just didn't feel right. She called her obstetrician and he told her that she should go into the hospital and get checked, just in case. She had just had a checkup and everything was fine, so we weren't that concerned. But, it turned out that she was in pre-term labor and was immediately admitted into the hospital. They did everything they could to stop the labor, but after a few days, our son and daughter were born -- three and a half months early. They were born at what is called the cusp of viability -- in other words, any earlier and they would not survive. At 24 weeks gestation, they at least had some, however small, chance of survival. At birth, they were only 11 inches long and about a pound and a half in weight each. They were immediately taken to the Infant Intensive Care Unit and hooked up to all kind of machines -- breathing tubes, IV lines -- all kinds of scary stuff. It was pretty horrible. And three days later, it got worse. They told us that our daughter had severe bleeding in her brain and would not survive. The hospital allowed us to hold her for the first and last time, that afternoon. I sat there helplessly as our daughter, our first-born child, died in my wife's arms. As terrible as that was, we had no time to grieve because our son needed us. We spent that summer, three and a half months, visiting him in the hospital every chance we got -- holding him, feeding him, and learning how to care for what they called a micro preemie baby. He still has some minor issues, but I'm thrilled to say that today he is a happy, healthy boy, but during those first few years he needed a lot of time and attention from us and a lot of my creative music endeavors got pushed to the side. And I just did not have the emotional energy to do any of it anyway -- to be brutally frank, worrying every night if my infant son would survive another day (not to mention burying our daughter) really took a lot out of me. So, ten years had gone by. We had another daughter -- incident free, I'm happy to say -- and during that time, I did stay active in music. Eventually, I racked up an impressive resume. I continued teaching private lessons and continued to play guitar and bass with a few different bands. I've played all around the country (one highlight was playing in L.A. and hanging out on the Hollywood Strip like a real rock star!). I've also had the good fortune to play with people like Uli Jon Roth (Scorpions), Robbie Krieger (The Doors), Joe Stump (in fact, I'm his fill-in bass player!), Graham Bonnet (Rainbow), Tony Franklin (The Firm), Chris Poland (Megadeth), Johnny Hiland, Warren DiMartini (Ratt), and Michael Angelo Batio. But I had missed doing my own thing! So, I started writing new songs. The songs that I wrote were very catchy and the lyrics were (for me) surprisingly emotional. I used Rainbow's Down to Earth album as a kind of guide for the music -- it's catchy and radio friendly while still retaining a raw rock element to it. And, of course, there was plenty of room for killer guitar work in the vein of Michael Schenker, Jimmy Page, and Ritchie Blackmore. I then called on a few friends (Penny Larson - drums, Sarah Gardner - vocals, and Art Ellis - recording engineer) to help me realize my vision. And I have to say that it came out better than I could have hoped!! I used a guitar I built myself that gives me exactly wha
