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

Then we moved to town, and those sweetly subversive dreams of "living off the grid" got papered over with all 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 noodle packets, 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 Jewish-by-birth ex-Hippie kid in a meth-riddled lumber-mill town on Interstate 84.  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 in the summers the sun went down into that notch in the hills.  

Breaking out of my little town was a revelation.  At 17 years old, I was extremely eager to learn, and I probably got as close as I ever will to knowing it all.   As an undergraduate in college, every subject fascinated me, so I avoided choosing a focus for as long as I could.  I eventually stumbled into the correct major for me,  called "independent studies".  The program could have just as easily been called "do what you want"; which was lucky, because it kept me around until graduation.  

By the end of school I had a tentative grasp on the idea that I wanted to be, or maybe even was, an artist.  So in a way, to make or break my theory, I headed for the most faraway-place I could think of: the South Pacific.  I pictured 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 simply be nuked by atomic scientists wearing safari hats and sunglasses, and no one would even miss them.  I figured chances were good that I could find an uninhabited island and play Robinson Crusoe and figure out how to survive while writing songs and poems.  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 almost no money, and yet instead of trying to earn more, I wanted to figure out how to earn less.  A journey to get away from everything I knew and yes, to try to find my voice 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.  

Of course, it never came out anywhere near as clean as all that.  When ideology meets reality things take on a form and a shape that's unpredictable and beautifully deformed by the whims of circumstance.  I headed out for the "South Pacific", but I was waylaid for half a year partying with a hilarious bunch of rowdy Australians in Melbourne.  I did eventually find my uninhabited island to inhabit, but it was only about 80 yards from mainland New Zealand.  I only played Robinson Crusoe on that tiny island for a week or two, before I got tired of rowing to the marina every other day to refill the water jugs.

I hopped sailboats to the Tongan islands, still thinking I might discover a pure virginal culture, still dreaming of some Rimbaud-like disappearance into something impossibly distant.  But in Tonga I was shocked to find mormon missionaries, donuts, whole families riding on single motorcycles, a lot of pregnant stray dogs, and gangster rap pouring out of dimly-lit beer bars.  I learned gospel songs, in English, from Tongan fishermen who didn't speak English.  I have some great field recordings from that time, on that paragon of ancient forgotten recording formats: the MiniDisk.  The fishermen flipped out when they realized that they could listen back to themselves on my Minidisc recorder.

It might have taken me until then to start appreciating something I still learn everyday: that human life is always mixed up and messy, that we are all knit into a fabric of inconceivably varied ideas, cultures, and influences, but that we're all the same at heart.  That no one really knows what they're doing and those who pretend to are often insane.  

 There are a lot of people trying to pose as purists of one type or another.  Pure rockers, pure folkies, pure patriot, 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 almost two decades.  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 greatly admire and respect, and love to work and create with.  So as much as I sometimes long for those early days of high-seas and high-minded adventuring, I love living 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.