Songwriter and Performer

John has been fronting bands and writing music for over 25 years in a number of generas. As a singer and front person, he’s enjoyed covering classic country or his own songwriter music. Even without a band, he’s found audiences for his folky, storytelling style bringing both his originals and the tradition of Texas singer songwriters.

From psychedelic indy rock originals to country music, he has brought his attention to bear on dozens of original projects, helping write and revise both musical and lyrical ideas.

John is college drop-out; after receiving and undergrad degree in Philosophy from Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX and then a MA in Rhetoric from WTMU in Canyon, TX he then failed to receive a PhD in literature after passing the qualifying exams. His book on sequalization in horror films will hopefully never see the light of day.

However, his time working with burgeoning writers, both undergraduates and graduates, left him with a deep respect for teaching writing and revision. Working with other songwriters is one of his main goals, not as some kind of gatekeeping pedagogue, but more as a coach to encourage the words that almost all people could express when given some attention.

It only took about a decade but it certainly seems like all those poetry and literature classes have started to sink in, driving him to author dozens of songs for himself in the last couple of years.

John started out writing, as a lot of folks do, as a 20-something nerd, bringing the word-salad surrealism of their literary and artistic heroes to bear on lyrics. That’s a hard row to hoe, as they say in west Texas, and between the general lack of people and a lack of talent they mostly produced fairly idiosyncratic, hard to understand bits of psychedelia.

As John moved on from their long-time home of Lubbock Texas, they took up more of a trades-person approach to making music- long hours were spent practicing technique on keyboards, double bass, cello, pedal steel, and guitar. John joined up in big bands and learned to read music, and participating in musical theater improved pitch and timbre.

Backing other singer-songwriters, John learned how to work an audience. Getting better tips is great, but the real lessons came from learning how to listen and understand what the audience wanted and how to put weird ideas into forms more digestible.

As John’s children moved into their own lives, the jobs doing computer programming for the web were replaced with less lucrative but more enjoyable ones: playing music for audiences and making spaces for other people to succeed in doing same.

In John’s own words:

My main goal in life these days is to play music with people I respect and love. That's it, but that's more than I ever thought I'd get.

These days John is wholly occupied with the craft and business of making music; marketing his own work, producing and engineering other peoples’ work, and performing with his friends.

Longtime Listener

John’s most recent album, Longtime Listener, can be found wherever you get your music. More

https://open.spotify.com/album/3uOAAQGDMjtGeMlQX92BCG

https://music.apple.com/us/album/longtime-listener/1862357618