When I was 11 years old I would fall asleep to Carlos Santana's Abraxas - twenty years later I figured out where my ease with latin rhythm came from. I've got one of those clear tenor voices in an age where guys have made screaming into a fine art. I don't scream well. I've been singing all my life. I was raised on show tunes, but the first album I ever bought was Black Sabbath's Paranoid. then I bought the single for American Pie - (remember Don McClean? They were on the radio at the same time...Go figure.) I wore the grooves out of both of them.

In 1979 I left my hometown of St. Louis to study jazz at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, fell in love with the Pacific Northwest and stayed. I write music in lots of styles - whatever the song wants. I've not spent a lot of my life playing anything I didn't want to play, which might not have been great for my technique, but I get along alright. I've been really fortunate to have found players who find my stuff interesting. I come up with concepts for bands and find players to fit. I've written the music for for Gaia Consort, a very short stint with Dragonfly Champagne and now run a band called Bone Poets Orchestra. They've been almost all the same players. Several cuts on our CDs have received airplay on a number of college and commercial radio stations across the US and in Europe.

The late 80's and early 90s brought me to Seattle where I played all the singer / songwriter venues - The Backstage (opening for Greg brown,) OK Hotel, Tractor Tavern, Antique Sandwich in Tacoma, - Folklife, Music in the Park, even busking for a short while in the Pike Place Market. I was a "fixture" at the University Bistro's Songwriter Showcase. I can barely stand to listen to single guy and a guitar these days, but every once and awhile I hear something like Death Cab for Cutie's "I'll Follow You into the Dark" Something by Bill Bourne and my joy in it will be renewed. These days I'm doiing a lot of writing for strings. I've done really silly day jobs - wine bottler to legal clerk to handy man to keep the roof over my head, nothing like corporate defense law clerking to provide inspiration to do something meaningful.

In 1996 I had what I fondly regard as a "predatory encounter with someone posing as a music industry rep." We got back from our "European disater tour," put the music down for a year and worked our way out of debt.

In 1997, I finally figured out I was never going to get signed, wouldn't sign on if they wanted me, and started doing music to connect with people. I wrote another album's worth of music and my wife Sue and I debuted as Gaia Consort at Nudestock '97 - and we got a standing ovation from 800 naked sunbathers. Alright then.

We played to a lot of Pagan audiences, I wrote a lot of lyrics that celebrate the living Earth. I still do in lots of ways, but the goddess stuff, not so much. Still, we did pretty well - oddly enough, we found larger numbers of people when we stopped playing coffeehouses and clubs, and started playing house concerts. We eventually started renting grange hall type places, then small theatres and eventually worked up to a festivals - kind of climaxing at Faerieworlds where we played for five years in a row to several thousand people. It had a sweetness about it, that's for sure, but well - we've done that. GC did four albums that I'm proud of and the 4th, Vitus Dance I plan to re-press as a Bone Poets title. But first, Belladonna Smiles.

Check it out at at the Bone Poets site. I think over the years, the Gaia Consort name scared away some people that otherwise would have liked us. So now we're Bone Pets Orchestra. We might actually play a club or two, if the opportunity arises, but it's a tough call. We're not about selling beer. I want to do something that grabs you and reminds you for a minute that you are part of the dust of the Big Bang and that you have the whole outrageous Universe at your finger tips and about three billion seconds of time to understand it all. Hear it, groove with it and make your mark!