I have so many hours of dream ing logged in at my parents gas station in Chugiak, Alaska. Ring up a cus tomer, dream… stock the shelves, dream… mop the floors, dream… plow the snow, dream… I had spent my whole life in this remote town ask ing the ques tion “what am I gonna do with myself if I stay here?” so as soon as I had saved enough for a ticket and a gui tar I moved to LA. I needed to find out…
My Dutch/Welsh father dropped out of 6th grade to sur vive the Great Depression by pick ing cot ton for bowls of beans until he lied about his age to serve dur ing the Korean War to sup port his parents… he was a self made man…he built our gas station with his own hands…he taught me to fol low my bliss. My Fil ipino mother, who left her par ents to board in another town and walked miles in the rain with a banana leaf for an umbrella to go to school, having sewed her own uni form and cooked her meals on a lit tle fire as a child, believed in the Amer i can dream and made a new life in Alaska with greater pos si bil i ties for her chil dren… she taught me that wit, intu ition, resolve and impro vi sa tion can go a long way…the rest is left to fate or luck or the com bus tion of our indi vid ual spark.
Sup pos edly, I loved music since before I was born. My mom says that when she was preg nant with me, she craved piano so badly in fact that she bought this lit tle spinet and took lessons. When I arrived I would turn my head toward sounds, imi tat ing them when I could. I remem ber being very small and stand ing upright, reach ing over my head to put my fin gers on the piano. The keys felt very wide and too big for my hands but they made sense to me. I learned mostly by ear even though I took lessons from the age of 4–13. I never learned how to read notes. My teacher would assign a clas si cal piece then I would ask her to play it for me. Our lessons came to an end when she fig ured out I was only really learn ing to play these songs by ear. All those years I had pre tended to read the notes, I knew where I was on the page, but the shapes made no real sense to me, only the music itself made sense.
Although I knew the Hells Angels that would come through the gas sta tion, I was also brought up in the church by my mother. There I was part of a choir and I learned a lot. I got into gospel music that I found on tape at the library..Martha Bass of Chess and Checker Records. By the time I was 14 I was a wor ship leader at my home church and at 16 joined the youth out reach to the home less youth of Anchor age. We brought them food and they joined us in ser vice. I was 17 when I got the notion to write an album. While vol un teer ing at my col lege radio sta tion it occurred to me that peo ple made a liv ing doing what I loved, so I thought I would give it a try.
With com mon sense, hard work and man ual labor my upbring ing at the gas station, pur su ing music was a lux ury. It wasn´t hard for me to save a lump of change and go to the city…I did the Hol ly wood thing hit tin´ the streets with the demo I made at my friends house…at the time those were the only songs I had written…I mean I had played piano and sang in church since I was yay high but I was going by the seat of my pants, fig ur ing out my sound as I wrote since “Fate” I decided to rework my sound. To come away from the exclu sively singer songwriter label and dive back into the beats that gospel music had lured me in with. I missed being soul ful. I wanted to make peo ple feel the music not just lis ten to it. It took a long time to record what I heard in my head. A lot of col lab o ra tors were there for me, help ing to coax it out. I let my inspi ra tion have it’s way with me, to make some thing new.
I love it when a song comes on the radio and every one knows the words. It’s the great est sen sa tion to com pletely fall into a moment in time, to be swept up, taken under the spell of a lyric a rhyme a melody. When songs evoke the response of turn ing them up and singing along, it’s magic. I tried to write an album like that.
