Music is the longest running thing I've attempted to be creative with... though it's often been a love/hate relationship. When I was in elementary school, my parents made me start piano lessons, but I hateed it so I whined enough that they let me quit barely a year in. I didn't touch an instrument again until about half way through highschool, when for some reason it caught my attention. I'm pretty sure the main initial reason was that I figured girls would love it if I could play a song for them. That being said, I started teaching myself music theory and got caught up in the technical parts of making music, and after that it's just been a stubborn push to force more talent out of my head than may have initially been put there. Fortunately, this is an area where being stubborn really paid off. Despite my fairly accurate awareness of my ability level at any given point, it's never stopped me from trying to get better, and with enough time I can confidently say I did get better. Even if I'll probably never be as good as I expect myself to be.
I've always written songs to express how I was feeling about things happening in my life... and I'm pretty sure there've been folks who thought I was oversharing at the microphone. I think music is the best therapy there is. (Not cheapest, because instruments are expensive.) I'm including below some songs stretching back through the various bands I was in, all the way to my earliest highschool recording efforts.
I haven't recorded a majority of the songs I've written, and haven't counted them in a while (the last time I did, it was over a thousand)... the picture here is a quick peek into my lyrics box. A few folders are my written sheet music from various arrangements, mostly from back in highschool, but the lyrics span from the mid 1990's to the current day.
In the sections below, click a title with the + symbol to open that section, and click it again if you want to close it. Inside those sections, you can use the players to check out the songs.
Over the years I've tried to become my own band, not because I prefer it to playing with other people, but I've never found the time to get a new band started up. (I definitely don't enjoy the audio engineering aspect of recording music nearly as much as writing songs or playing instruments.) Any drums on these were programmed by me, though some of the older ones are actual drums being played... vocals and instruments are all me, too.
About a year before moving to Toledo (the second time) I'd gotten a digital multitrack of my own. I'd previously had to borrow one to make recordings.
I'm really bad at editing a song when it's "done"... but sometimes I force myself to and am happy with the results. In this case, the chorus was from a song years ago that I didn't like because of the verses, so I wrote a new song around the chorus instead. Would like to come up with more instrument parts yet, but this is the main idea.
Last song written for my covid music project... the whole thing together will be called "Selene" once it's done. Songs like this one are a challenge for me because it's hard to not keep adding things in. However, very often simpler is better.
My flavor of an old old story...
Rare for me in that there's no piano part. All guitar - two acoustic parts, one electric, and then lead and bass. Channeling a little bit of the 70's.
Another version of an older song, a few different words in the chorus, some melody changes, etc. Probably the most often re-touched song of mine, originally written somewhen around 2008.
I let myself get a little bit more cliche in some ways with this, and just followed the idea once I originally had it to see where it went. I felt like the lyrics "yesterday still comes around" were something I'd heard in a song before but Google failed to help me find it so I figured I wouldn't worry too much.
This one's been a slippery one... I can't decide if there needs to be more parts (guitar, strings, something)... nothing I try works right, so maybe it's supposed to be more stripped down. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Channeling a little bit of my childhood musical era... getting a little bit better at lead guitar, but am really wishing my finger callouses were thicker. Ouch. I think if I liked my voice better, this one would be my favorite yet. I need to really get off my butt and practice more.
Attempted to bring a little bit of blues into the mix with this one, at least in the lyric pattern...
Playing around with a new mic, making things up for fun... though sometimes the random chaos spits out the truth.
People seem to confuse the intent/meaning on this one... the imagery is about church, but it's really about relationships.
This is yet another song for my imaginary girlfriend.
I've enjoyed playing randomly in minor keys ever since highschool... A minor is a good one because playing all white or all black keys always makes improvisation easier. Plus, I've always felt that A minor somehow expressed my emotional voice best.
This song was written on a napkin at Remie's bar in Marquette (during my early college years this was THE dive bar, typically where folks went after the other bars closed.) One of my man post-first-divorce songs.
For a while I saw Toledo as the "place marriages go to die"... maybe not completely fair on my part. In any case, this was written about how it felt to be in a town I didn't want to be in, missing home.
This song was written specifically for the open mic at Vango's that I spent a good couple of years playing the heck out of. It was meant to be fun—the chorus is a song that one of the other guys there used to always play, and I tried to work in references to a lot of the main folks that were there on the regular.
One of my post-second-divorce songs, written during the open mic days, though I never played it out back then. Most songs I write about personal situations never see the light of day, but sometimes they have pieces or parts that make me hang on to them.
Depressed feelings are often the seeds of music, or at least it's always been that way for me. This was written shortly after moving to Toledo. I even tried to make a video for it using my smartphone to take selfie videos... not sure it adds anything, but you can check it out on YouTube if you'd like.
Another post-second-divorce song... I've been trying to figure out a piano version ever since I wrote it and can't find it. This is me trying to talk positive to myself. Doesn't usually work. lol
A kind of experimental song... back when I was still trying to sing in a higher register than my voice allows. I decided to go low. That plus the lyrics apparently make for a depressing song... I was once told at the open mic (by the manager) to never play it again.
Every now and then I write a song and record it and then never play it again. I haven't played this since I recorded it. This is what happens when you make music your psychological medicine.
Most of these are instrumental improvisations, where I'd start adding parts into the recording machine and just make up things to go with it. (I did this a lot when I had to borrow recording equipment to record anything.) I couldn't play a lot of them again very easily if I tried. A few are more actual song attempts.
Most of the piano things I write are slower, but when you have a multitrack you can explore outside the normal bounds... this is two different piano parts, mostly messing around with mostly a single chord (one brief progression to pull it out before falling back in.)
Probably my earliest attempt at being my own full band - these are an actual drum set, and me playing guitar, bass, piano, and singing. It's not necessarily great, but I was pretty happy at the time I recorded it... the way I learned to do anything musically was always to just try it before I knew how to do it. Not super efficient, but it is what it is.
In highschool I wanted to start a DJ company called Frozen Flame. Because back then, that was how you named things. :-) This is just me messing around with various sounds on a synth that was new to me (Alesis QS6).
Early in my initial college years I was a secondary music education major. That gave me access to the computer lab where there was music software that let you compose digitally. This was me playing around with that software. The notes were clicked in and then played back from the computer. This is a short one.
Keyboard takes a bit of a back seat so I can experiment with guitar... I've never gotten very good at soloing on that instrument, so here I was recording a bit of a progression for the purpose of playing around with melody.
Self awareness. Not sure what more can be said here.
And sometimes improvisation doesn't need an instrument. I'd borrowed a four-track and this was me sitting on the couch with that and a mic. I sometimes wonder what kind of music I'd make if I did drugs.
Elsewhere on the page here you'll find a version of this recorded back in highschool with someone else singing it better. This is a song I wrote for my first big highschool crush. We dated for a week, but I'd had a crush on her for a couple of years before that. She broke up with me through a friend of hers, because highschool. It's one of the first songs I wrote that I really liked, so I've tried to record it every now and then, but I'm never happy with my singing of it.
More noodling with a new synth... I really liked the saxophone sound it had. I've only played reed instruments briefly during one of my college classes, and it's best for all of us that it ended there. I make sick geese sound beautiful.
Another post-first-divorce song... recorded on a borrowed four-track while still living on campus at NMU.
More noodling on a new synth... perhaps the happiest thing I ever recorded. I blame the flute.
Here's some real drums instead of programmed versions... my band at the time practiced in my basement, so between practices I had access to a decent drum set thanks to our drummer not wanting to haul them each time.
More noodling on a new synth... closer to the feel I usually went for. I really liked it when I got that first professional level synth.
For some reason, when I was recording this (making things up as I went) I kept feeling like someone was coming in the room behind me when I would listen back to it through the headphones. Still creeps me out.
Improvisational experimentation... I recorded four tracks, with each one being a single note melody, adding them in over time.
I discovered that humor went over well at the open mic so ended up writing a bunch of naughty songs. Most of these are those, though I've mixed in a couple serious ones too. I always felt very schizophrenic because of how different the joke songs were from the serious ones.
They always say "write what you know"... I don't know if I know a lot about boobies, but I've certainly thought about them a lot over my lifetime. In the back of my head I had it figured out that I would write a song that encouraged women to flash me. Never worked.
Guess where I wrote this song? One of the things I loved most about some of these goofy open mic songs was the wordplay.
A friend of mine who also played at the open mic at Vango's was writing a song for the waitresses... I don't remember the specifics of the moment, but I got it in my head I could do better so wrote this.
For some reason, a few people had a contest to see who could write the best lesbian song. If I remember correctly, mine was judged the winner by an actual lesbian (she was one of the regular musicians there). Though I'm also sure I offended a straight couple who got up and left.
My most requested song at the open mics. Women seemed to love it. I basically took a list of pickup lines off the Internet and made them rhyme.
At one point I got frustrated that I wasn't being a serious musician by playing so many silly songs, so I tried to do more with the piano. I never really came up with anything during that stretch that I really loved. This one's about religion.
One of the songs that started my open mic career, such as it was... I wrote a couple of songs like this shortly after my first divorce, and would get up and play them at the Village Pub and I'm pretty sure people thought I was going to commit suicide afterwards. This one has my favorite line I ever wrote... "it feels like God's pissing on my campfire."
Having borrowed a four-track recorder, I spent a couple of weeks attempting to record an album of sorts. I never really finished it, no name/title or anything. But these were my first attempt to be my own band - playing all the instruments and singing.
One of the couple of most depressing songs I'd written after my first divorce and frequently played at the Village Pub's open mic. It was the first time I branched out from the standard four chords everyone learns on the acoustic guitar.
Closer to the original version of this song (newer one in the first group above).
It's probably to safe to say most of my early years of songwriting were bleak. Even when I was trying to be optimistic.
Having been a fundamentalist Christian for a few years after highschool, my earlier songs often had more God references, even post-belief. This one sort of covered several different disillusionments in my early life.
When I wrote this I was trying to write a song about suicide that had "happy" sounding music, kind of going for a tension of sorts I guess. It definitely caught a few ears at open mic nights.
A little less metaphor in this one, the kind of straight forward lyrics that made some folks uncomfortable. Written post-first-marriage.
Always was proud to have squeezed a White Lion reference and musical nod into one of my songs. (And a reference to Poison of course.) I think I've been sure since highschool that my wife only existed in my mind.
I took a list of country song titles off the Internet and ordered them to rhyme. Ironically, it makes for a pretty good country song.
My parents moved to Wisconsin when I graduated from highschool. I never liked cheese, and I liked to point out to them often that there was indeed too much cheese in Wisconsin.
Written in a class at NMU where I should have been paying more attention to class.
This was my intro to funny music at the open mic... it was amazing to me how much easier people were entertained with humor than depression, though that shouldn't really have been a shock. Though one fellow musician there accused me of being "too clever" because of this song. (The horns were an afterthought that in retrospect don't really work.)
More original version of this song (newer one above in the open mic section).
Written about the ending of a best-friendship, which tends to happen when they're your room-mate but sleep with your ex wife before you're fully ex.
Improvising with the synth a bit, channeling some 70's vibes...
An attempt to revitalize an older song written in my Reality Shock days.
Written for a girl I met about a year after my first divorce. I actually met her online before that was a thing. We only dated for a few weeks, only met in person once. She helped pull me out of the divorce funk though, which was no small thing.
Written about/for my kids (though before my youngest was born)... becoming a dad put me through a lot of reflection and eye-opening.
Probably my best received "serious" song at the Village Pub open mics... the song went through some evolution over the years, in particular being played more on the piano than guitar.
Though I have strong musically conservative streak, I do like to experiment, too. I made the most out of my Alesis QS6 back in the day.
In highschool I really enjoyed writing and arranging music on paper, while I was learning various things about music theory. At one point shortly after leaving highschool and starting college, I took some ideas of songs from my highschool days and decided to create an opera of sorts from them. I never really fully developed or finished it, but I used the computer lab in the music department to be able to hear the arrangements. (Vocal lines are set to use a synthesized human voice but no words, obviously.) Each movement was it's own idea, then they all came together in the final one. Unfortunately, synth technology wasn't too far along yet, so the instruments don't sound very non-digital.
A wide range of efforts from pre-1991. I started playing piano in my junior year of highschool, and spent much of that and my senior year paying way more attention to music than class. (My grades reflected that very clearly.) At various points I wanted to be a rock star, or an old-style classical composer. I was fascinated with music theory. Any drums that aren't recorded on the highschool's set are from a casio keyboard. And I used my mom's boom box as my recording device. I had a second cassette player, and I would record one thing, then play it back on the other while playing along to it, if I needed more than one track.
Written at the very beginning my brief fundamentalist religious phase. I always felt like piano and heavy metal guitar belonged together.
I spent a LOT of time improvising depressing piano music in my later highschool years. This was recorded on the highschool's grand piano, where I often spent my lunch hours.
At the time I thought this was my best rock and roll song. :-) Using the boom box and seondary cassette recorder, I recorded the drums at school and then the guitars and vocals at home. I'm always fascinated when I listen to these early recordings, in that my singing doesn't sound much different than my speaking. Even now, decades later, I wrestle with my voice as an instrument.
I was in love with the Eb minor pentatonic scale, mostly because it was easy to play on the piano... you just hit random black keys and you've got instant melancholy.
One of my first efforts to arrange a more classical style of composition. I had four flute players from band class help me record this at lunch.
This was my main highschool musical idea (the melody)... originally written on a small tenor guitar I'd gotten from my grandpa's house after he died, while sitting on my back porch and listening to mourning doves.
Slightly different arrangement, with a little shock factor at the end. People didn't quite know what to make of some guitar shredding at the formal graduation ceremony (played at my graduation in 1991.)
Me being funky in my bedroom after having my first bass guitar to play with.
Written for our highschool graduation ceremony.
Another broken heart song recorded at a choral concert. I sometimes wonder if they ever realized back then (if they were there and heard it) that I was so quick to overshare long before the era of Facebook.
Maybe the epitome of my highschool drama expression... piano and metal guitar felt like two sides to the same coin to me.
The original piano version of the more involved song. Probably my second most favorite musical idea during those years.
Me singing and playing guitar, and Paul (a guy who worked at the music store I hung out at) was helping with the recording equipment and bass line.
Written for the girlfriend who would become my first exwife. The first time I'd written and recorded a song where I was singing.
A snippet of my lunchtime highschool piano improvisations...
A snippet of my lunchtime highschool piano improvisations...
A snippet of my lunchtime highschool piano improvisations...
A snippet of my lunchtime highschool piano improvisations...
A snippet of my lunchtime highschool piano improvisations...
A snippet of my lunchtime highschool piano improvisations...
A snippet of my lunchtime highschool piano improvisations...
A snippet of my lunchtime highschool piano improvisations...
A snippet of my lunchtime highschool piano improvisations...
This possibly contains the most wrong note in any guitar solo I have ever played. Other than that it was a fun smushing of piano and heavy guitar.
Another one of my more regularly played and worked on highschool emo pieces... this one and a few others felt like I was somehow expressing my feelings in a way words never could.
This was the original version (just piano) of the song.
I'd brought an orchestral arrangement of one of my songs to choral practice to see if the teacher would let me try it out after class with some volunteers, which he did. He then suggested we play it at some of our concerts, which was my teenage fifteen minutes of fame. I even got a short interview/clip on TV6 where I first learned I had a yooper accent.
When Van Halen's "Right Now" came out I felt a little cheated, there's a lot of similarity to the note pattern I was playing with here. (I also came up with the idea of Gregorian chant and pop music working together just before Enigma hit the scene... I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.)
More fun with synthesizers...
Half written, half improvised piano music...
Written for my graduation in 1991... sung by a couple of classmates (I played the piano). I'd hoped to write our class song, because I'd written the one for the class before us, but didn't manage it. I did get to play several songs during the ceremony though.
The class song for Ishpeming's graduating class of 1990. Written to be intentionally easy to sing, and it turned out to be a lot of fun.
Written for a girl I had a crush on. She was a foreign exchange student, and nothing ever had a chance to happen... though there was a fun evening with her and a couple of other folks where we drove around Marquette tricking vending machines with her equivalent of pennies and then hit up a briefly in business dance club.
Written for a girlfriend that was only a girlfriend for about a week or so. (I tended to fall hard and fast.) This was recorded at a choral concert.
While I've definitely spent more time playing alone than with others, I've had the most fun with music when playing in a group. There's nothing that beats the high of playing in front of an audience with a group of musicians who are able to pick up on each other's ideas. I would love to be in a band again, though I can definitely do without the somewhat frequent drama that seems to go along with it. (Musicians are just emotionally reactionary on average.)
This was the last band I was in, which broke up right around the time my youngest son was born (though of course not because he was born.) We played all covers, mostly 80's and classic rock. I played mostly keyboards, with a little bit of acoustic guitar and some annoying moments on a home-made percussion kit made of pots and pans.
We played a few gigs, but mostly spent time in the basement practicing. Unfortunately, I don't have any recordings to share.
This might have been my favorite band I was in - we played a few covers, but mostly originals. Joel played electric guitar, Tara was our lead vocalist, Shawn played the drums, and John was our bass guitarist. I played keyboards and acoustic guitar. Joel and I wrote most of the music, and Tara came up with the lyrics and vocal melodies. We did surprisingly well at hich town bars where they were usually only wanting AC/DC, and played quite a few gigs.
Some of my fondest memories were from the beginning when Joel and I hung out at his place writing songs, usually with a jug of wine, and my entire goal was to break his brain with chord changes that shouldn't work but did. It was a blast.
One of our earlier songs - I'm playing acoustic guitar on this one.
A fun keyboard part for me... I always liked the half-step stuff.
Written from a moment of tuning my acoustic guitar. Was literally just getting it in tune and noodling around and said, hey this should be a song. This really highlights why I love being in a group - where an idea can have things layered on by everyone that make it so much more than it otherwise would have been.
Probably my favorite to play... we tended to always get too loud when we did. Joel had mostly played in metal bands previously, and I think playing piano along with heavy music is my favorite thing to do.
A recording from a practice where we were still working this one out...
Recorded at an outdoor gig called Goatstock. I'm playing piano on this one.
This was the first normal band I played in (to my mind, as the only one before was my Christian rock band I'd started.) They'd been together a few years, and then I joined up and we played for a little over a year before it eventually broke up. I took it pretty hard, I really felt like a musician for the first time while I was jamming with these guys. They are all incredibly talented.
Terrence was our lead vocalist and flutist (rocks harder than it sounds), Jeff was our guitarist, Scotty played the drums, and Tim held down the bass. I played keys, but also got to sit in on drums because Scotty played the horn—so for Play That Funky Music and Low Rider I got to pretend I knew what I was doing on the drums.
One of the tracks from the CD "Practically Live" that we put out during the time I was with the band. I'm playing piano and organ on this one (organ was never something that came to me very naturally.)
One of the tracks from the CD "Practically Live" that we put out during the time I was with the band. More piano and organ.
Here's a look inside a jam band's practice session. There were moments more focused than this.
One of the tracks from the CD "Practically Live" that we put out during the time I was with the band. Just piano for me on this one.
Recorded (poorly) at the Village Pub during a gig. This is me trying to play the organ.
One of the tracks from the CD "Practically Live" that we put out during the time I was with the band. Just piano on this one, but some fun moments for me.
Working on adding a new song to the set list... posted here mostly just to fulfill the phrophecy. :-) (See next music clip.)
Yes Terrence, yes it did.
A fundamentalist Christian rock band started initially by myself and Clint when we met as freshmen at NMU around 1992 or 1993. He and I shared a house (on Rock street, literally) and had started writing and recording some songs, and then met Gary who was our singer for a short while. During that stretch of time we then met Kent who took over guitar, Gary left and I took over vocals, and I played mostly bass at that point (running through both a clean amp and a distorted one at the same time.) People took us for a punk band, largely because my playing was rough and vocals certainly were as well.
We played a few gigs with other local bands, and had gigs at a few churches, though we spent a lot of our time practicing and writing/recording. One of my favorite gigs was the Radio Xmas concert (held by Radio X from NMU, an idea I'd had on a long drive to the student radio conference in Rhode Island) where local bands played Christmas songs in their own styles. We had a blast with that.
I'd left highschool, but highschool hadn't left me... some emo squeaked back in from time to time.
Recorded at a battle of the bands on NMU's campus... this was the most metal we could make Kent play.
Recorded during some sessions where we were working on an album that never really got finished. Inspired by a guy that used to preach on NMU's campus.
Some melancholy for childhood, mixed into a Christian mindset.
One of the Christian bands I liked a lot at the time was Sometime Sunday, who's style I was emulating with this.
One of the songs I was proudest of at the time, because of my playing the bass like a rhythm guitar. Written about some dreams I'd had back then.
Recorded at one of the Gear Grinder Jams in Marquette, this was a song written about a hamster I had as a kid.
A fun cover, recorded at the Gear Grinder Jam. I've always loved 80's songs amped up with more balls.
Recorded at a Radio Xmas concert, us having fun with the holiday. We thought it would be fun to end our set with some thrash.
I don't think we ever knew what style of music we were trying to be...
Recorded (badly) at the Village Pub. Dedicated to a blues musician friend of mine. :-)
The beginning of some local musician drama - we wrote this to sound "punk", and included a quoted line from a local punk band who took it a bit personally and mocked us for a few years afterward. Best publicity we could have asked for.
More highschool style introspective melodrama, but from a Christian sinner's perspective...
Recorded for our last attempt at an album...
Writen about some guy who screwed over an exgirlfriend of mine. I was a Christian, but not a perfect one. :-)
I liked to point to this when someone would suggest Christian music was all happiness and harps. Sin makes for a morbid story-scape.
Another "punk" style tune...
Before I played bass (Tony was still playing at the time) Kent joined up and played lead guitar while I played rhythm guitar. This was recorded at a church practice in Ishpeming. Kent started moving us a bit away from metal and toward a more complicated sound, which ended up being good for us.
Another fun cover recorded at the Gear Grinder Jam... I'm not sure how we figured songs like this made sense for a Christian band.
Rock St Demo - just myself and Clint working on a set list before we had a full band.
Rock St Demo - just myself and Clint working on a set list before we had a full band.
Rock St Demo - just myself and Clint working on a set list before we had a full band.
Rock St Demo - just myself and Clint working on a set list before we had a full band.
Rock St Demo - just myself and Clint working on a set list before we had a full band.
Rock St Demo - just myself and Clint working on a set list before we had a full band.
Rock St Demo - just myself and Clint working on a set list before we had a full band.
Rock St Demo - just myself and Clint working on a set list before we had a full band.