The fall of 1976 was a cold one in Millinocket, Maine. By November, it was a little too late for the baseball gloves and a little too early for skiing. I remember hanging out one particularly chilly weekend afternoon with a childhood buddy named Jamie. We spent our time commiserating about the fact that there was nothing for a kid to do during those gloomy, late autumn months in northern New England. After hours of boredom, Jamie finally had an idea. He had heard through the grapevine that a local Catholic Nun named Sister Millie was offering group guitar lessons every week down at the church. Without hesitation we signed up and by the following Monday night, Jamie and I were sitting in a large circle of aspiring musicians all of whom were armed with semi-out-of-tune acoustic guitars. All, that is, except me. In my small northern Maine hometown, there was no place to buy a guitar. So for the next several weeks I faithfully attended guitar lessons, sat in a circle watching Sister Millie teach everyone how to strum 'Michael Row Your Boat Ashore', and did my best to participate by nodding, smiling, and memorizing chords in my head. Finally, after the fourth week, Sister Millie approached me to kindly and gently say that if I didn't have a guitar I really shouldn't be attending guitar lessons. Truth be known, I think she had a point. The holidays were fast approaching, so I threw myself at the mercy of my mother and begged her for a guitar for Christmas. I'll never forget the day she came through the front door with a beginner's acoustic guitar that she mail ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Years later, she told me that the guitar cost a whopping $25. And so it started. I began learning songs from my parents' 8 track tape collection...--John Denver, Eric Clapton, Simon and Garfunkel, etc. Anyone who has owned an 8-track tape player knows that this is a particularly challenging endeavor given that there was no fast forward and no rewind. I had one chance to listen to each song and figure out the chords. If I missed something, I had to wait 40 minutes for the song I was learning to come back around. I think this is why guitar players my age can figure out songs pretty quickly! When I turned 18, I moved to Portland to attend the University of Southern Maine. What a great city and what a great college. It was the place where I had my first taste of true musical inspiration. There is nothing like new friendships, novels, heartbreak, and the ocean to shake lyrics from someone's head. Writing never came easy, but when it did come I found it to be cathartic and addictive. During those years, I also had the chance to perform the songs that I wrote with my buddies Scotty Huff and Scott Furrow in a band we formed called Chronicle. After college, I moved a lot. In 1992, I took a train from South Station in Boston to Union Station in Kansas City to attend graduate school at Central Missouri State. That was a tough couple of years. I had no money, I was studying constantly, and I seldom performed live. On a positive note, my graduate program demanded that I write a lot and while journal reviews and research papers can be a bit dry, I think they helped my songwriting. Because I constantly had to be reading and synthesizing information, my mind was warmed up. So along with the academic papers, songs were pouring out as well. After a brief stay in New Jersey, I then moved to Stevens Point, Wisconsin to begin a full time day job at the local university. It was there that I met a songwriter named Jim Flint and we started an acoustic band called Barnaby Creek. It seems like we performed at every venue in the Midwest; bars, colleges, coffee shops, etc. One fateful night, we performed at a place called Steep and Brew on State Street in Madison. A woman dropped a note in our tip jar explaining that she and her husband owned an independent record label in Toronto, Ontario and that they would like to sign us. We called the seemingly dubious number on the note and 2 months later we were on a plane to Toronto to record the first
