I was born into a tribe of semi-nomadic back-to-the-land hippies in Eastern Oregon in 1980.  My parents made money for part of the year, planting trees as contractors for the US Forest Service and living in teepees and yurts.   The rest of the time they tended their garden, took care of the horses, practiced midwifery, tanned buckskins and beaded clothes and generally homesteaded.  It was something between Eden and squalor. 

Then we moved to town, and those sweetly subversive dreams of "getting off the grid" got papered over with the normal shit of child-rearing in the '90s; parent-teacher conferences, piano lessons, insurance, VHS camcorders, rollerblades and skis and skateboard ramps, high-school musicals, ramen noodles, roofing leaks,  Les Miserables 2-CD-Box Set, family pets, TV-watching time limits.  Before I knew what had happened, I was a teenaged, dubiously born-again Christian Jew Hippie kid in a meth-riddled small-town America.  I wasn't allowed to listen to Nirvana.  So I sneaked it on unmarked cassette tapes.  

To the West of my town, the freeway disappeared into a mountain pass called Deadman's Pass, and the sun went down into that notch in the hills.  

Breaking out of that little town was a revelation.  At 17 years old, I wanted to know everything, and I probably got as close as I ever will to knowing everything.  Every subject in college fascinated me, so I took classes in everything.  My major was "independent studies", but you could have also called it "do what you want"; which was a stroke of luck, because it kept me around until graduation.  

And when I finally knew everything, I headed for the South Pacific - that seemed like the most exotic place I could think of.  A place so isolated by ocean that time hadn't had a chance to tarnish it, where paradises were so numerous as to be expendable, where whole islands could be nuked by atomic scientists wearing safari hats and sunglasses, and no one would miss them.  I figured chances were good that I could find an uninhabited island and figure out how to play Robinson Crusoe and survive.  That appeared to me to be the purest thing I could do.  The goal was pretty simple: to get out of the cycle of earning and spending money to buy things that really only serve the purpose of facilitating that selfsame cycle.  I had started writing a lot by then, poetry and music, countless half-baked songs and one or two good ones.  So it was a journey to get away from everything I knew and find my thing as an artist too.  I wanted to tear it all down, everything I'd learned and seen and tried to emulate in the past.  I wanted to start with nothing.  

It never came out quite as clean as all that.  When ideas become realities they take on a form and a shape that's unpredictable and beautifully deformed by the whims of circumstance.  I headed for the "South Pacific", but I was waylaid for half a year partying with hooligans in Australia.  I did eventually find an uninhabited island to inhabit, but it was only about 100 yards from mainland New Zealand.  I only played Robinson Crusoe there for a week or two, before I got tired of rowing to the mainland every other day to refill the water jugs.

I hopped sailboats to the Tongan islands, in search of a pure virginal culture, a Rimbaud-like disappearance into something impossibly distant.  But there I found mormon missionaries, donuts, a lot of pregnant stray dogs, and gangster rap.  I learned gospel songs, in English, from Tongan fishermen who didn't speak English.  I have some great field recordings from that time, on the ancient forgotten recording format: MiniDisk.  They flipped out when they realized that they could listen back to themselves on my Minidisc recorder.

It might have taken me until then to appreciate something I still learn everyday: that human life is all mixed up and messy, that we are all a part of a fabric of inconceivably varied ideas, cultures, and influences.  

 There are a lot of people trying to pose as purists of one type or another.  Pure rocker, pure folkie, pure punk, pure country.  I'm not a pure anything.  I'm an American and that could mean just about anything.

  I have called Nashville, Tennessee home for over a decade.  It's here that I found a community of people who inspire me and keep me creating, musically and otherwise.  I count as friends people that I admire and respect, and love to work and create with.  So as much as I sometimes long for the days of high-seas and high-minded adventuring, I love being in a place where everyone speaks my favorite language, which is music.  

My strongest belief, and the one constant that I can distill from all these inner and outer adventures, is that life is mysteriously divine, and that this planet we are a part of is host to infinite wonders.  Our challenge while we are here is to appreciate them and one another fully.