My first memories involve writing music to match cartoons while the TV was muted. Looking back on that, I realize that not much has changed. My life has taken different paths, and it’s the moments of knowing when those turning points occurred that stick out the most.
So the story goes: I started playing the piano at age 3, was a total ham in grade school (I practically forced my little sister to perform the musicals I wrote), and then went to Cornell University to study biology and ecology, with a double major in music. My first job out of school was doing SCUBA diving research for the United States Geological Survey, which led to my first “turning point”... I realized I missed music. So when the river got cold and we went on a break, I found myself in Rome, Italy, writing music for a friend’s web site.
And thus began my music career.
I wrote music for anything I could get my hands on until I was lucky enough to finally land a “day job” as an assistant tech at the top notch jingle house, BigFoote Music. This led to opportunities to compose for commercials and eventually the position of Music Supervisor. All this time in New York, I thought, "if I had a record, I could pitch my songs to these ads." Turning point number two. I joined a band to "see how it was done", learn the ropes and, pretty soon, met enough musicians to form my own band. Before long, "Shoes Off And Run" was born, followed by "Craving The Second", and I am about to celebrate the one year birthday of "One Up". (These are my albums, not actual names of children.)
All the while, I was slowly establishing myself as a composer at BigFoote, using the composing studios after hours to write on any commercial jobs that were in-house and to develop my songwriting skills. I found myself being drawn to long format pro- jects. I felt more inspired by the emotions of characters than the colors of products. I started looking for long-format scoring and music supervision projects outside of BigFoote in addition to more co-writing sessions with sinter/songwriters.
When the touring bug hit, I left BigFoote to pursue my own performance career, soon realizing that touring alone wasn’t enough. When asked by Emmy-award winning composer Sean Callery “So what happens if your touring takes off? Will you stop being a composer?” I immediately replied, “Of course not. I will do both.” This was the third turning point: the realization that my true love is creating music, no matter what format.