Photo courtesy of Dave Gillespie

My first band was a duo I had with my neighbour Justin when I was around nine years old. We were called T&J Rock. It was mostly me triggering demo tracks from the Yamaha keyboard my parents had bought for my sister and I from Costco, while Justin improvised melodies using a Fisher-Price Crazy Combo Horn, which for all intents and purposes was an elaborate kazoo. We would record these jams using a cassette recorder, the kind that has an internal microphone so the sound of its gears inevitably end up being a prominent feature of any recording made using the device. Capturing these moments of creativity and pure joy is something that I have loved doing ever since.

The keyboard was a great entry point into music for me, but what I truly wanted to have in my hands was a guitar. After years of pestering, my parents finally bought me a guitar (also from Costco) when I was 11, and this is what truly led me into the realm of songwriting.

I had a copy of the Neil Young compilation Decade that I had dubbed from an LP one of my uncles had left behind at my grandparent’s house. This was in the 90s when everyone had ditched their vinyl collection and replaced their most cherished albums with CD equivalents. There was something so desolate and cinematic sounding in these Neil Young tracks from the late 60s and early 70s. He was a cowboy of sorts, and a loner, and bummed around in the desert. His songs really took me to a place that I could visualize in my mind.

The first song I ever wrote with chords, and words, and the whole bit was very much a rip off of “Cowgirl in the Sand”. Even at the time I knew it was not that great, but it was a real song, and it showed that I could do my own version of this thing which allowed me to illustrate the world of my inner dialogue through sound and words.

From what I’ve talked about here, you can see that I’m passionate about the gear, and the slightly antiquated equipment that surrounded my music appreciation as well as my music creation in those formative years. Capturing not only a sound, but also a mood and feeling is something that has always excited and fascinated me. Songwriting provides me with an outlet to process my thoughts and make sense of the world and my relationships. Also important, it provides me with material to be able to record. Recording is in some ways a more technical side of music, but for me the two sides have always existed in a symbiotic way that is continually gratifying and provides opportunities for endless exploration.