How I got into music, and why I'm still doing it.

For years I experimented with tape recorders. My parents used to use cassette tape recorders in the 1970s to send spoken letters to my grandparents. About 1974 they upgraded from one kind of cassette player to another, and my Dad gave the old one to me.

I would make something like the radio plays I heard on CBC Radio (our equivalent of NPR.) I got very good at figuring out how to make the sounds I wanted. I could simulate explosions and fires by blowing on the microphone. I could use doorknobs and door hinges to make mechanical sounds. My Dad had an old telegraph machine in the basement from his days in the signals corps. I used that to make computer beeps. And then I discovered that on shortwave radio there were all kinds of computer sounding beeps, so I used those as well. I got to be a near-expert at sound recording at a young age.

Still, other than sometimes incorporating singing into my radio plays, this wasn't music. There were two catalysts that made music such an important part of my life – the death of John Lennon in 1980 was one of them. I fell in love with the Double Fantasy album, and that led me to really get into the Beatles, whom I'd only listened to a handful of times before that.

The other catalyst was that my father bought my mother an organ for Valentine's Day that same year. One of the things that came with this organ was a “teach yourself to play” book, and so I did – I learned how to play the organ out of a book.

Within a few months of Lennon's death, I had started a band of sorts. I was a terrible singer. My voice was breaking because I was that age, and I had very little musical skill at this point. But I did do one interesting thing – I wrote a song for our first practice, and it was a blues song, a twelve bar. It was a dreadfully awful thing whose chorus was “Sue sue sue sue, I don't know why I fell for you.” But it was a blues number, and that was the musical genre that I would stick with from that point forward.

It did not take too long for me to realize that taking an organ to school was not practical. Other people played guitars, and make music out in the sun in the spring as the let-out of school approached. With what little money I had, I bought a wreck of a classical guitar at the Crosby flea market near the Big Rideau lake that summer. I tried to teach myself the guitar over the next year. My Dad and I actually took continuing ed classes on the guitar that fall together. My Dad dutifully paid attention. I was in my own little world, trying to advance beyond the teacher. I literally did the Bryan Adams thing and played until my fingers bled. A friend and I spent every weekend writing songs – some of them silly, some of them meant to be serious. We were awful but it was fun, and his Dad a great guitarist, showed us a lot of tricks. He and he and I are still friends.

Towards the end of this school year, my parents frowned on me getting an electric guitar. So I saved my allowance and bought one secretly. It was a cheap Les Paul clone, but it was beautiful looking.

I switched schools the next year, and ended up at a high school, Glebe Collegiate, with an incredibly vibrant music scene (one which would later produce Alanis Morissette.) In one of my classes, I met a guy named Dave who played the piano and guitar, had good equipment, and wrote songs. I went to his house frequently on weekends, and we'd listen to songs, write songs, and I'd record them. We started a band, and we named it Tresa (after a math teacher in my previous school I'm sorry to say I had much lampooned in class.)

We were terrible, but less terrible than my previous efforts. And as I participated in coffee houses and what not, I got introduced to some of the incredible musicians that hung around the school. Most of them played the blues, and in a much less inexpert way than I did. One of them was a fellow named Tortoise Blue. Another guy, named Chris, played the blues on his signature Gibson SG in a way I'd never heard before. He channeled all those old Chicago blues guys I listened to on the college radio station. I set to work learning how to play the blues in earnest. I listened, I watched. I bought a book and finally learned how to bend and vibrate notes properly.

When I left high school I became a professional musician, even as I attended university. I started a band called the Sugardaddys which became an A-list clubbing band – this was during the age that Ottawa's music scene was at its most vibrant, and churning out people like Tony D , Sue Foley, and The Phantoms. I thought of Tony particularly as a mentor, since he was always showing me guitar tips, and well he sold me a really good Twin Reverb amplifier I still own.

After the Sugardaddys split, I started a band with Tortoise called Evolutions and the Higher Primate Horns. We were really ambitious, playing Tower of Power stuff with a horn section. But we were all tiring of years of clubbing, and we only lasted a year. I bought myself a four track and a drum machine at this point, and started experimenting with multi-track recording, with Tortoise's help.

When Tortoise headed off to Toronto, I kept at it on my own. But I missed playing live. I met a fellow named Ron at a Blues Tues jam, and then we met a guy named Jack who is perhaps one of the coolest, unflappable people ever to live. We restarted the Evolutions name with a new lineup.

This band, for the first time, let me fuse my desire to record and perform live. We gigged about making money, and saved enough to partially hit the recording studio. It so happened I got laid off from work about this time. For the first time in my life, I was making my living solely by music.

In a sweltering barn my parents owned, Ron, Jack, and I recorded all the bed tracks we needed, and then we bought time in a studio and recorded piano and horns onto the barn recordings. We engineered the recordings mostly by ourselves, which was probably a mistake. We got a somewhat raw sounding record as a result, but it has a vibrancy and personality other local records of the day weren't capturing. Local radio stations gave us some airplay, and it was all very exciting.

That part of the story ends in 1993 – a lot has happened since, which I won't detail as I've probably already made everyone yawn. Evolutions still exists, but I don't really lead it anymore – our keyboard player, added in late 1993, has kind of moved to the forefront. I do most of my singing in church now, in the Blessed Sacrament Rock the Glebe folk group. I enjoy this the most of any of the singing things I've done, because I feel it brings me as near to God as I can get. As St. Augustine says, “He who sings, prays twice.”

I've continued to find new and better ways to record. My wife, my brother in law, and my sister in law built me a surprise recording studio in the basement for a birthday. I've fetched software tools (like Audacity, Hammerhead, and Quartz Studio) that help me make music. For me now, it is a little like building model railroads. I like to take ideas, and craft them like little miniatures, until they form a complete portrait of a little world. I will never be a rock star. I've long abandoned any idea that I even want to be.

But I am compelled to make music. That is all God has ever needed me to do with my gift, that and to use it to offer it back up to Him. It is something which gives me joy, which lets me give joy and comfort to others, and which I think helps God reach out to me as well. I sing, because I am.