MUSICAL HISTORY

I am a folk/rock/Americana musician out of Tucson AZ with a new album coming out called Circumnavigate. Here is a bit of my history, laid out in the context of a collection of bands and musical projects I've been a part of...in reverse chronological order of course.

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The Steel Sahuaros: I currently play guitar and contribute background vocals for a Folk/Americana/Country band here in Tucson. Coming to Tucson from the northeast, I had already started delving into country music a bit through discovering artists like Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell. I mean, I already had a dog named Isbell by this point. But I had MUCH to learn. Joining a band that plays songs by the likes of Waylon Jennings,  Jamey Johnson, Loretta Lynn, and Townes Van Zandt has been a crash-course in discovering a genre that had always been at the periphery of my musical tastes. And playing with a group of talented musicians is always a joy. After joining the duo of Andrea Lithgow on vocals and Daniel Lithgow on guitar, we have since rounded out the band with Greg Gillilan on Bass and Harrison Schmitt on drums, and we play gigs throughout Tucson. One of the highlights of my time here in Tucson has been playing the 2020 Tucson Folk Festival with the Steel Sahuaros. You can find out more about the band and info on upcoming gigs here: www.thesteelsahuaros.com

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Third Time's A Charm: My wife, Bethany, is a Unitarian Universalist minister in town. This is crucial to know for this story. One day, I was walking down the street with my dog when a van pulled up behind me. From the driver's side window came a hello and an invitation to join a couple bands. It was Michelle Coleman, a congregant at Bethany's church who I had just met days earlier and who just so happened to live down the road. Being the master networker that she is, Michelle had already joined two musical projects in her very short time in Tucson since moving from Idaho. One was with the daughter of a woman she had recently met while perusing the flower section of Home Depot (or Lowe's...I forget), and one with members of the legendary Tucson band I Hear Voices! Well, I gladly accepted her invitations and first met up with Michelle and her new friend Elisa Colbert (daughter of the woman from the flower section) to accompany them on guitar. They are both amazing singers - and instrumentalists - and had built a repertoire of great harmony driven folk and Americana songs. Long story short, we all hit it off musically and created Third Time's A Charm and played folk music throughout Tucson before life took us all our separate directions. But not before Elisa introduced me to Daniel Lithgow of a local folk/country act called The Steel Sahuaros. You can learn more about Third Time's A Charm here: www.facebook.com/ThirdTimesACharmBand

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One More Time: The second band that Michelle had invited me to play in during that fateful day on a Tucson sidewalk was called One More Time. Michelle had begun playing music with Kathy Harris and Suzy Ronstadt from the band I Hear Voices! and they had a spot at the Tucson Folk Festival. As the three of them were going to focus on their tight harmony arrangements for the set, they were looking for a guitar accompanist. After several weeks of practicing, we all took to the stage at the Tucson Folk Fest, along with Daniel Reed on Bass. As is evident so far, the Tucson music community has been very welcoming and is full of talented and supportive musicians who are willing to connect and collaborate.

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The Revampers: When I first moved to Tucson with Bethany and our animals in 2018, I found several open mics in town to play my music. One was called The House Of Bards. The open mic had a house band called The Revampers that would play well known songs, but chop them up or switch styles or "revamp" them somehow. Like, what would "Man Of Constant Sorrow" sound like as a shuffle? How about with a bolero rhythm? What about a Motown style arrangement? They needed a bassist and asked me to join when they heard I also play bass. I took them up on the offer and immediately had the most musical homework I've ever had in order to catch up with a band's repertoire. We played all sorts of songs from different genres; "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," "Walk This Way," "Autumn Leaves," a Santana medley, a Calypso medley, and a surf rock medley, to name a few. Another job of The Revampers as the open mic house band was to accompany various open mic acts that wanted a full band to play with. This meant learning songs minutes before a performance, or while onstage. This was a great lesson in thinking on your feet and listening closely to your fellow musicians, as well as in humility when it was clear that the whole thing barely stayed on the rails. All in all though, when we were playing songs we didn't just learn seconds ago, we were a pretty decent act, with Iain Bujak on vocals and guitar, Zeke Parra on Guitar, and Mike Burris on drums.

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Sunbird: I'll skip my time in Syracuse New York, where I lived before Tucson. I studied audio production there. There's more on that somewhere else. So before THAT, I was in Boston, MA, and I found a great band on Craigslist called The Ghost of Vigoda that was looking for a guitarist. The band had lost multiple members for various reasons and consisted then of only guitarist Matt Cuddy and singer/songwriter Everett McKee (who would later design the album cover for "Circumnavigate"). I joined the two of them on guitar along with David Goodchild on Bass and Ariel Rejman on drums and we changed the name to Sunbird. Sunbird was a funk/rock/jam band that played gigs throughout New England and released a pretty large catalog of music for our relatively short time as a band. You can hear a bunch it right here: www.sunbirdband.bandcamp.com

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Zen Armada: Before Sunbird, there was another Boston band I found on Craigslist called Zen Armada. The band consisted of Andy Hollinger on vocals and guitar, Marty White on bass, and John Nourse on drums, and they were hugely into the nineties alternative rock group Morphine. Morphine was led by a singer/two string slide bass player. As a big Les Claypool fan, and fan of experimental music in general, I fit into the band's musical sensibilities. We clicked quickly and played shows around the Boston music scene, starting in late 2013. This was my first band since playing for the Bridgewater State University Jazz Band and it was a great fit for my love of playing in a dual-lead guitar lineup. The BSU Jazz Band had about five rotating guitarists, and sometimes had three onstage at a time. This gave me an appreciating for the art of listening to find where you can fit in and not step on any toes. Zen Armada and Sunbird gave me that same opportunity to play off other talented instrumentalists and find a niche somewhere between straight rhythm guitarist or straight soloist. This would become the blueprint for the sound I was looking for in creating my first solo record.

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Canyon Smith Militia: The first concert I attended and the first record I owned were both Third Eye Blind. After getting that all red self-titled album and listening to it dozens and dozens of times through, I became obsessed with music. Then came Everclear and Incubus and Sublime and Nirvana and a quick Smash Mouth phase and Blink 182 and Greenday. In high school, I discovered Led Zeppelin and that's when the trajectory of my musical fandom immediately turned toward classic rock. I had been playing guitar for a couple years at this point, but this is when I became a lot more serious and started forming some bands with my high school friends. Canyon Smith Militia (a name created by pointing out three random words in a history textbook) came to consist of me on guitar, my friend Tim Murphy on bass, and another friend Chase Wheeler on drums and guitar and we played numerous open mics and a few shows in the area. But the band went through lots of iterations to get there, as well as a few different band names and way too much behind the scenes drama. Eventually, our inability to find a singer led all three of us to share the burden of singing, and that is the reason I am no longer only a guitarist, which at the time would have been the dream. The three of us shared a love of classic rock as well as current (at the time) alternative bands and we had a long setlist of songs by The Beatles and The Shins and The Animals and Pink Floyd and The White Stripes and The Who and the list goes on and on.