ARTIST

When my first grade teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was clear: I wanted to be a poet!

Also I imagined a side hustle running a boutique where I designed fancy hats.

As the years went by and I spent my time in my parents LP collection and unravelling the Chopin Etudes of my piano lessons, my dream shifted slowly, imperceptibly, to something even more exotic. I wanted to be a musician. But I told no one. Not even, really, myself.

I remember vividly driving some one-lane Southern Maine highway, on the way to a regional competition with my high school clarinet quartet. From the front seat my band director said to me, offhandedly: “Don’t drop the clarinet. I have a feeling it might prove relevant for you someday.”

Oh the suggestion I’d be a musician! My poor heart couldn’t hold all the hope!

Well it turns out I dropped the clarinet. I promise you today, above high C I could do no more than squeak.

But as a senior in college, finalizing my honors thesis in Anthropology and preparing for another summer of health care work in Nicaragua, something happened. My obsession with words and my unrelenting passion for melody looked each other in the eye. I realized that wonderful as my study of both classical and jazz had been, I had only ever been a tourist. I had not yet played MY music. The music that was truly mine to make. My ACTUAL contribution to the Great Music Conversation.

I wrote a song!

It wasn’t much to speak of. But I could play it for you today. Because it was the North Star I have followed ever since.

I continue to distill my truth at that intersection of words and melody. I love how the two inform each other. Cast each other in new and revealing lights. I am equally inspired by a heady jazz extension, a timeless folk lyric, and a bubble gum pop hook and I’ll reach for all of it to serve a song. I submit pieces of myself to the songwriting machine and watch them become something different: lovelier or scarier or sadder or sweeter than I realized myself to be. I offer my gnarled humanity in the hopes that it gives others the permission to do the same.

Thank you so much for you interest in my music.