For 30 years I’ve made my living in this world, paid my bills and my taxes, raised my kid, almost entirely from the writing of computer software.  It’s a solid skill, always in demand, and I’m good at it.  Both before and throughout that entire professional career I have also had a (far less lucrative but infinitely more satisfying) shadow career as an independent musician, writer, filmmaker and creator.  I have a resume that details the technology career, but not really one that details my career as a creator.  This is that resume.  Kind of…

I was born into a family of musicians and singers and raised with access to instruments and primitive recording technology but never had any formal training with two exceptions: I played french horn in school band for a few months in elementary school and I took a 6-week crash course in guitar when I was 12.  I didn’t consider that music was something that required training if you had an ear, and I had that, so, I figured I could work it out for myself.

Music was not my first creative passion.  The first was visual art.  I liked to draw and paint.  My mom was a singer in a band and my dad painted wildlife watercolors and could draw exceptionally well so I had my pick of parents to emulate and older brother Rhett was already obsessed with music so I wound up glued to my sketchbook.   As I got a little older I decided that even though I was good at drawing and enjoyed it what I really wanted to be was a writer.

By early adolescence I had broadened my interests still further, having taught myself how to write software for the home computers of the era and also having developed a rabid obsession with cars.  The first three years after I bought my first guitar I rarely practiced and was much more interested in the 0-60 times of the Porsche 959 and drawing and designing imaginary cars than I was in music making.  Then puberty hit and some switch in my brain went musical.

Rhett and I had our band, The Lavone, and we had recorded a lot of music, but I was a fairly passive participant until suddenly I wasn’t.  I started having musical ideas and interests and really learning what to do with them around the age of 15.  I upgraded my guitar and got some cool glasses and turned into one of those High School Art Kids.

Visual arts and explorations into videography and photography were of nearly as much interest as the music.  When I was in high school I was always creating one thing or another.  I wrote a few bad novels, created sculptures and jewelry and pottery and learned basic woodworking, made some paintings, all the usual stuff that a teenager does to look for ways to express themselves.  Rhett and I started our little basement record label, Nuclear Gopher, and music became a core part of my identity even as I started doing less writing, less painting, less drawing, etc.

Post high-school I got married and my time for creative work trended downward but my need for it didn’t.  I started coming up with ways to give myself excuses to keep recording albums with The Lavone and creating visual art even as my software engineering career began.  Since the internet was a new phenomenon at the time, that meant building a website for the Nuclear Gopher as well as making music videos and short films.  I can honestly say, however, that my 20’s were a period of creative challenge.  I made some great songs with The Lavone and the Nuclear Gopher turned into it’s own amazing thing, but I found a role for myself as more of a producer, a technician, a documenter, an archivist, and an enabler than as a musician.

As I was approaching 30 I was getting nervous that the life of a creative person was becoming too inaccessible for me.  I had a young child to raise, my other career was time consuming, and I often wondered if I was just deluding myself that I had anything worth creating inside me.  I started to turn my attention more towards filmmaking and writing.  I taught myself digital video editing and the basics of cinematography.  I made some shorts and started planning to make an indie feature film.

But, as John Lennon once sang, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  My 30’s started with the general disruption of my entire family, life, and self.  A lost religion, a failed marriage, and estrangement from my family and friends.  I had nothing really to fall back on except music.

I realized that I wanted to, NEEDED to, make music, and I started my solo music career at the grand old age of 30.

At first I had a lot to learn.  Despite spending over half my life in and around bands and recording studios, I had never really engineered or produced my own music.  I could play guitar and sing but I couldn’t drum worth a damn and keyboards were a mystery.  Regardless, I tracked an album that I didn’t share with anybody and then I tracked an EP called The Context in 2004 and then my first proper album, Songs of Be Redoubt, the following year.  I wrote the songs, engineered the tracks, played all the instruments, designed the cover art, mixed and mastered it, the whole thing was a learning process.  By the end of working on Bo Redoubt, I was quite a bit better at the whole solo music making thing but I was still missing some of the polish that would come from playing in a band that had regular practices, live shows, and opportunities to hone my skills.

An opportunity soon arose to do so and I decided to join a band called The Eclectics, a Unitarian Universalist church band that played at Sunday services.  I played the guitar and sang, we played in front of the congregation, and after a year or so I was feeling a lot more confident musically.  In February of 2007 this lead to the formation of my (to date only) post-Lavone band, Trumpet Marine with three other members of The Eclectics.  We tracked an album called Longer, Louder, Lobster and it was arguably the best thing I had ever done up to that point.  I felt like I had arrived, at least a little, enough to try my hand at fronting the band on stage for some gigs.

Trumpet Marine was short lived, however.  Competing commitments caused members to come and go, we were constantly relearning the songs with new people, I just couldn’t hold it together and by early 2009 I gave up the idea.  I had recorded another solo album in the meantime and it was…  OK… but I was not yet a confident musical artist.

The next year or two involved some personal drama and my bandwidth was once again limited to really reach for what I wanted to do musically.  I was almost ready to give up on music but then I wrote a song called “I Sleep With My Hands In Fists” and it rallied me to get up off the mat and come out swinging again.  I had my studio and I was recording and writing, I had also played here and there in another few short lived bands, but it wasn’t clicking.  If I wanted to get things to click I needed to change something.

In early 2012 I struck some creative gold with an album called Blood and Scotch/Valentine, which I tracked in a couple of weeks all on my own.  I even broke out the art supplies and painted the cover, a bright yellow heart amidst a haze of chaos.  I knew I didn’t want to give up after that record.  I just didn’t know exactly what happened next.

I remembered that playing in other bands had helped me develop my skills and increase my passion for music so I decided to try that again.  I joined a local Ween-meets-Devo group called Robots From the Future as their keyboardist despite being pretty bad at keys.  I figured I wouldn’t get better unless I had a good reason to do so.  We played shows and practiced and I did get better.  There was no real pressure because I wasn’t the front man and they weren’t my songs.  I could just focus on playing.  Robots music wasn’t really my best fit, though, so I left the band and started making plans for the album I really wanted to make.  I had a sort of “back to basics” idea where I would record a few short EPs and then get serious about making a record that I would be totally happy with.  I figured that might take me a year or two.  I released the first of the EPs, The Coal Room, on Christmas of 2014.

I also joined another band, a 90’s cover band called Fistful of Datas, but this time on bass guitar and occasional auxiliary keys.  One of the Robots, Keith Lodermeier, was in that band and through that band I also met some other fantastic people, his wife Liz, Cris Arias-Romero, Maya Burroughs, and Mackenzie Lahren.  Another one of the Robots, Reynold Kissling, came on board near the tail end of my tenure with the group.

During the couple of years I played with that band I had a blast, met a lot of people, and improved my skills but that solo album I had committed to sort of went into development hell.  I just didn’t have the time to devote to solo studio work while also living the grown up life of a married career man in his 40’s.  I was having fun but I wasn’t creative.  Somehow the years were slipping by without much progress, even though I kept locking myself in the studio now and then.

I played a solo set at a now defunct space in St. Paul to try out some of my new album material in front of an audience and that led to an invite to join yet another band, Awkward Bodies, as a bass player.  The music of Awkward Bodies was definitely more up my alley than 90’s cover songs so I was really excited to join them and more shows followed.  Things were going pretty good and my spirits were high, I thought I might finally get my new album done, but then John Lennon happened again.

I don’t know what it was, exactly, but the world seemed to go nuts starting in 2016.  An orange sociopath was somehow put in power in my country and I became too obsessed with the fallout.  Social media and podcasts and news feeds and negativity took over my headspace.  My creative output dwindled to nearly nothing, despite having a great studio sitting in my own damn basement.  At least I was playing in Awkward Bodies and enjoying that but musically I was closer than I had ever been to hanging it up.  The world seemed too stupid to want to create within it.  It seemed like every day there was some outrage or insanity and playing cool indie rock was just not enough.  My software career had changed from writing code to running the department so I spent none of my day doing hands-on work, instead getting enmeshed in emails and meetings and exhaustion.

Then something weird happened in 2018.  A filmmaker named Scott Homan contacted me about telling my story for a documentary.  We met.  I told him my story.  I had no expectation that this would lead anywhere bigger than a short on YouTube, if that.  I didn’t know him or how serious and committed he turned out to be.  That event changed my life.

The world descended further into chaos with a global pandemic and my beloved Minneapolis being torn apart in the wake of the George Floyd riots.  Awkward Bodies struggled to hold the band together and keep some sort of momentum.  I continued to struggle to find personal creative traction.  But Scott and his editor, Sian Walmsley, just kept hacking away at making a movie and as it took shape I started to see my creative career differently.  It had not been a success but had also not been a failure.  I had struggled, sure, but so does everybody else who creates.  I was no longer in my 20’s but I had improved at every aspect of making music and art in the meantime.  And, most importantly, I had made a positive difference in the world with Nuclear Gopher and with my writing and my art.  When I saw the movie for the first time I woke up and knew what I needed to do.  I saw a possible future.  Not commercially, but artistically.  And I felt inspired again.

I got serious about finishing my slowly developing album.  I started planning for a new chapter in the Nuclear Gopher story.  I came to the realization that my time spent wandering in the creative wilderness, taking my licks, getting better at my craft, making mistakes, failing at plans, meeting people, playing Spice Girls covers while dressed as a zombie, and just generally living my life had made me stronger and more self-aware.  Sure, I’m older now, oldest I’ve ever been, but I’m not slow, I’m not tired, I’m not out of ideas, and I’m not ready to hang it up, not just yet.

The last couple of years have involved a LOT of work below the waterline.  Renovated my studio for future commercial use, making plans for the new Gopher, several revisions of the album (which is now practically done), and a new attitude towards the work I am doing that has really put me in a good place mentally.

My creative career could be counted in how many albums I’ve contributed to, how many shows I’ve played, how many films and videos I’ve made, etc, but I don’t even know the answers to those questions.  I guess I don’t care or I would keep track.  What I do know is that I’ve been dedicated to a life of making whatever art I can manage for as long as I can remember and for helping others do the same.  That’s my career.  That’s what I want to be remembered for when I die.  If nothing else, I’m leaving behind artifacts that prove I was here and that I did my best.  What else can a person do?

Skills and Experience:

I have demonstrated proficiency with:

• audio engineering and production (both digital and analog)
• digital video editing using Final Cut Pro and Davinci Resolve
• guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, vocals, and other instruments
• photography (both film and digital)
• graphic design, painting, drawing
• website development
• writing

Salary Requirements:

Happiness.