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When I am asked how I got into music my response almost always begins with "when I was about 9 my Gammy bought me my first guitar."  She made it very clear to her grandchildren that she was not old enough to be a grandma so we would call her "Gammy", 16 years later her instructions are as active as her gift.


In my head

I began dissecting and listening to music with intent around age 8.  I was entirely mesmerized by two peculiar effects music had on me. 

The most obvious and likely the most intense of these, emotional influence.  Meandering the quiet woods of Northern Idaho with my Walkman tape-deck clipped to my jeans each song violently stripped and replaced the tranquility around me with new bizarre coverings.  It was as if my childhood imagination could be switched on, off, or to random crazy with the buttons on my side.  So... I became hero in many an epic saga using this method!

Emotional immersion always brought his sympathetic twin, mental imagery.  A constant stream of mental imagery created in real-time, analogous in rhythm and intensity, and (like a movie) always displaying the same pictures every time I watched the song.  This deviation from the usual so demanded my attention it never failed to leave me with a 1,000 mile gaze as I stared at the projections with open jaw ignorant of my surroundings.

These moments on cloud 9 have mandated the continuance of musical experience in my life.