MUSIC FOUND ME IN THE DARK

People often ask when I got into music.

The truth is, I never really got into music.

Music got into me.

Long before I ever wrote a song, stood on a stage, or dreamed of making an album, it was already there... waiting patiently in the background of my life.

It began in a house that knew as haunted.

Growing up, I lived among strange sounds, unexplained events, and the constant feeling that unseen things moved through the rooms around us. But there was something else in that house besides the ghosts.

There was music.

In 1972, my father brought home what felt like a machine from the future: a massive quadraphonic stereo system. Brown wood cabinets. Record player. Radio. Eight-track deck. Four large speakers wired throughout the room.

Most people listened to music.

I lived inside it.

The sound didn't come from one direction. It came from what seemed like everywhere.

Songs moved through the walls. Through the furniture. Through your chest.

You didn't hear music.

You felt it.

My mother understood that feeling.

Before she became a flight attendant with TWA and traveled the world, she had been part of a singing act with her sisters. They were good enough to be offered a recording contract.

She turned it down.

Life took her somewhere else.

But the music stayed.

My sister and I grew up singing with her around the house. Jackson 5 records spun on the turntable. Puff the Magic Dragon floated through the speakers. We sang along to Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy and Barry Manilow's I Write the Songs.

I didn't know it then, but those moments were laying a foundation.

The soundtrack was already being written.

Then one day my father handed me an album.

Band on the Run.

Paul McCartney and Wings.

Something happened when I heard it.

I can't fully explain it.

But if you've ever had a moment where a door suddenly opens inside you—where something shifts and you realize the world is larger than you thought—you'll understand.

That was the spark.

And for me, that moment would come from a place I never expected.

Not from a stage.

Not from a recording studio.

Not from success.

But from loss.

From ghosts.

From cancer.

And from a voice in the darkness that would ask a question powerful enough to change the rest of my life forever.

For years, music drifted in and out of my life like a familiar spirit.

After high school, I decided to take it seriously. I studied piano, voice, guitar, art, and psychology in college. For the first time, it felt like maybe I was moving toward something real. Maybe the kid who spent years pretending to be in bands would finally find his place in one.

Then life intervened.

A football injury damaged my fingers and made playing difficult. Around the same time, a moment on stage shook my confidence and quietly pushed me away from singing. Looking back, neither event seemed dramatic enough to end a dream, yet together they did exactly that.

I didn't make a grand decision to walk away from music.

I simply stopped walking toward it.

Years passed.

Then more years.

The strange thing about destiny is that it doesn't always disappear when you ignore it. Sometimes it circles quietly in the background, waiting for the right moment to return.

Instead of music, my life moved deeper into another world.

The paranormal.

Ghosts.

Hauntings.

The unexplained.

What had begun with childhood experiences in a haunted house evolved into a career that took me across the world investigating mysteries most people never experience. Television shows, haunted locations, historic sites, eyewitness accounts, strange encounters, and questions that rarely had simple answers.

I spent decades listening to stories.

Listening to people.

Listening to places.

Listening for voices.

I just wasn't listening to myself.

Then something happened that I still struggle to explain.

Between 2010 and 2012, while investigating the haunted Belvoir Winery in Missouri, I found myself humming a melody.

At first I barely noticed it.

Then the humming became singing.

The song wasn't modern. It wasn't something from the radio. It sounded ancient. Repetitive. Haunting. Like an old blues field song carried through generations. Before the radio, before the wars.

The words weren't important.

The feeling was.

It felt as if it had come from somewhere else.

Not in a dramatic or supernatural sense.

More like remembering something I had somehow forgotten.

The melody lingered for years.

I couldn't shake it.

I didn't understand why it had appeared then or why it refused to leave.

I only knew it felt important.

It lingered.

In 2014, I finally tried to follow that feeling.

I wrote a demo song called Ghosts Don't Die and recorded it with musician Johnny Ricco and producer Rob Deaner.

For the first time in years, music felt possible again.

The song wasn't meant to stand alone.

It was part of a larger vision.

A television project.

A platform.

A beginning.

At least that was the plan.

Then a single decision changed everything.

The opportunity disappeared.

The project collapsed.

The momentum vanished.

Johnny and I continued creating. We developed ideas, themes, instrumentals, and concepts for future projects. He created the music, I helped with direction. But the doors never seemed to open.

The dream didn't explode.

It simply faded into the background once more.

And life moved on.

Or so I thought.

Years later, in 2022, I began quietly experimenting just a little with music again.

No expectations.

No plans.

No audience.

Just curiosity.

I revisited old lyrics, old concepts, old ideas that had been sitting in notebooks for years.

Something was stirring.

But I still didn't understand what it was.

Then cancer arrived.

Everything changed.

Suddenly life was measured differently.

Days mattered.

Hours mattered.

Moments mattered.

The future was no longer something you assumed would be there.

It became something you hoped would be there.

Hospital rooms became familiar.

Chemotherapy became routine.

Pain became part of daily life.

And somewhere in the middle of that battle came one of the hardest losses I've ever experienced.

My cat, Noir.

People who have never loved an animal may not understand.

But those who have know exactly what I mean.

Noir wasn't a pet.

He was family.

A companion through some of the most difficult years of my life.

When he died, something inside me cracked open.

The grief was overwhelming.

And in the middle of that grief, I did the only thing I could do. I had just started chemo. I had no immune system. So I did the only thing I could do.

I wrote.

In two days, I completed a song lyrically called Will I Ever Hold Your Paw Again. I used UDIO on my laptop to suply the vocals and music. Got it to where I was wanted it at the time.

I was exhausted emotionally and physically.

Weak.

Heartbroken.

Yet somehow the act of writing gave me something chemotherapy couldn't.

Relief.

Purpose.

A reason to keep moving.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

Lying in a hospital bed at Northwestern Medicine, staring at the ceiling after another exhausting day of treatment, I heard a voice.

Clear.

Direct.

Familiar.

A voice I had encountered before during other unusual moments in my life.

It asked a simple question.

'If there was one thing you could do in this life that you haven't done yet, what would it be?'

Even though I thought of other things I wanted to do to make a difference in the world if the statement meant "anything was possible" it said "No" and asked me again... The answer came instantly.

There was no further hesitation.

No further debate.

No second guessing anymore, I went right to it....

'Music!'

I want to create music for the world to hear.

Then the voice was gone.

The room was silent.

I even laughed.

'Too big of an answer?'

Nothing.

Just silence.

A few days later, Noir was gone.

And then something extraordinary happened.

The songs arrived.

Not one.

Not two.

Dozens.

Then more.

Ideas I had carried for years suddenly connected.

Lyrics appeared faster than I could write them down.

Titles emerged out of nowhere.

Stories I had experienced throughout my life began demanding to be told.

I wasn't searching for songs anymore.

The songs were finding me.

In hospital rooms.

On my couch.

At my kitchen table.

Late at night.

Awakening from deep sleeps.

Early in the morning.

Everywhere.

From hard rock to the mysterious blues influence I first encountered years earlier at Belvoir Winery returned as well.

This time I understood its purpose... CREATE & EXPRESS!

It became part of the foundation of what would eventually become Boogie Man Blues.

A collection of songs rooted in ghosts, spirits, hauntings, loss, survival, communication beyond death, hope, faith, redemption, and the strange mysteries that have followed me my entire life.

The album became more than music.

It became testimony.

Not only to surviving cancer, but to surviving disappointment, grief, loss, fear, and the countless moments that convince people to give up on their dreams.

Because sometimes the things we are meant to do don't arrive when we want them to.

Sometimes they arrive when we're finally ready.

Looking back now, I can see the thread connecting everything.

The haunted house.

The quadraphonic stereo.

My mother's singing.

Band on the Run.

Standing on stage with AC/DC.

The injury.

The years away from music.

Belvoir Winery.

Ghosts Don't Die.

Cancer.

Noir.

The voice.

None of it was separate.

All of it was leading here.

To this moment.

To this album.

To Boogie Man Blues.

I still live with pain.

I still battle neuropathy.

I still deal with brain fog, exhaustion, and the lingering effects of chemotherapy.

There are days when I don't feel strong.

There are days when I still have the blues.

But now there is music.

And after waiting more than fifty years, music finally answered back.

Maybe that's what this album really is.

A conversation.

Between the living and the dead.

Between the past and the future.

Between the boy who dreamed and the man who almost forgot how.

And perhaps between something greater than all of us.

Whatever it is, I'm grateful for it.

Because the story isn't over.

In many ways, it's only just beginning.

To quote my new spiritual friends that came forward during those late nights to help with this album....

Let's sing it now!