As long I can remember, I’ve always been singing a song. People always ask me what style of music I play. I’ve always found that a very hard question to answer because it changes, as it does with many musicians. Artists are pressured to answer this question, particularly by industry professionals who want to successfully market us–because humans like to categorize things to make sense of them. But that’s just not me. So, for better for worse, I went a different way and have no regrets. The truth is that most writers, musicians, and creatives are not just one thing. We study all kinds of subjects in tandem, spend years training in a kinds of different ways, and desire lots of different experiences to draw from. This is what writers do. I have chosen not to fight it.
I am currently a bit Adele meets Carole King with a solid southern lean and a retro throwback. But It’s not about any one genre for me. It’s about taking the sound or creative piece where it would like to go and combining influence to do so.
I become entranced with certain sounds and then I carry those influences with me forever: the sounds of the symphony, the woods by my house, the opera, a southern front porch on a Sunday afternoon, the coffee shops in Portland, the oceanic sounds of the western seaboard, time on the lake, the cold timbre of winter in Minnesota, art shows, the theater, the soccer field, the city, the radio, people arguing, the quiet books I read and the very loud birds outside my window. And, every piece or song I have ever heard.
I grew up studying classical music (concert piano, violin & choral music/art song/opera) but what I really loved to do was roll down my windows and blast country and/or Celine Dion and sing at the top of my lungs. Also, I grew up in the church and spent a lot of years singing at churches of various denominations: contemporary, gospel, traditional, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Non-denominational, you name it and I probably sang it. There was also musical theatre.
My brother’s probably influenced me more longer term than just about anything I studied formally. We grew up ski racing in the 90s. Which means that he listened to just about anything that could be found on the X-games soundtrack in my brother’s car on the way to practice: The Beastie Boys, 311, Rage Against the Machine, Bush, and Nirvana. My brother also played jazz, both piano and drums. Which naturally, I wanted to do everything he did, so I joined the middle school jazz band as the piano player too.
In college, I was a classical pianist, composer, and vocalist (opera), a lyric soprano, not even knowing I had a baritone range until years later. But in meeting people from all over the country, my friends loved all kinds of things: jazz and soul vocals (which I fell in love with), rap, and hip/hop. There was music of the Caribbean, for which I took a summer style study program there in college. It opened my eyes further into expression, lyrical phrasing, rhythmic progression and really just loving more complicated music. It was also deeply humbling, as nearly every person I met in the entire country could play music better and more passionately than myself and half my cohort who were music majors.
All of this, and then leaving the experiences in formal music education to write singer-songwriter style pop, country, Christian, and jazz. Then becoming a music educator, and learning al the music of my students over the years. It’s a lot. And my path has been a curvy one, but to me, art is art. It’s all valid. This is about the expression, the feelings, and the story…in whatever form it takes.
