Way back when
Autobiography
I was born in England and my family emigrated to the USA when I was still quite young. It dawned on me fairly quickly that since I had not grown up with the strange American sports I was being introduced to, I was always going to be bad at them (and the last one picked), so I decided to play the guitar every day instead of Little League or whatever.
My parents were both musicians and there was always music playing in our house. Classical, pop, standards - you name it. The arrival of the Beatles made a huge impression on me and I began to think about life as a musician. Played in a lot of bands in my earlier life; most of them awful, a few were OK and a couple were actually pretty good. I started writing songs when I was about thirteen. In fact, the verse section of the song “California” on this website, is the first melody I ever wrote. The song had different lyrics (so awful that I would never reveal them to anyone - even under torture) but the chords and melody are the same.
I wrote mostly for myself but also for some bands I was in. I found that I liked writing in a lot of different styles (some more extreme examples of that to be uploaded soon) and really didn’t like the idea of writing in one genre. It felt confining and predictable. The great satisfaction of this website is being able to present songs without the overriding concern of trying to be a certain “type” of songwriter or performer. So be warned, as things progress there’s no telling what may turn up.
Nick