It was these moments of wondering how Whitney Houston managed to avoid walking in anyone’s shadow and suspecting that the people singing on “We Are The World” might not really be “the children” that set the pattern of spending way too much time thinking way too much about music that has characterized my life ever since, although hopefully in the past 40 years I’ve managed to temper my tendency to take song lyrics way too literally, at least a bit.

The realization that music could be more than something to muse over in the car came a few years later, in 8th grade band. I wasn’t surprised when the band director told me to see him after class. Getting dressed down by Mr. Dial (RIP), who was a former NFL linebacker and looked it, had become something of a tradition over three years of goofing off in middle-school band practice, and the operatic treatment that I had just given to the second trumpet part of whatever we were playing seemed like as good a reason as any he’d had before. What he said, though, surprised me. “I know you were goofing off back there,” he told me, “but you actually have a very nice baritone voice, and I think you should consider joining the chorus at high school next year.” Maybe he just wanted to get me out of the band program, which would have been understandable, but this was the first nice thing he’d said to me in a while, so it stuck with me. 

I didn’t know what to expect on my first day in the chorus. I had never done anything like that before, and I had never even really thought of myself as a person who liked to sing, certainly not in front of people! It only took a few days for me to be completely hooked. Choral singing became my first entry point into the intoxicating experiences that music offers: the ecstatic feeling of locking into a harmony with other singers, the sickly excitement of being exposed on stage in front of an audience, and the social cohesion that comes from being bottled up with a bunch of people in a long process of rehearsals and performances.

And of course, through all of this, I was doing a lot of listening. My parents had done their job well, and by the time we reached double digits, my sister and I were up on The Beatles, Bonnie Raitt, The Rolling Stones, The Impressions, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, … Then, one day in the car, driving from my aunt’s house to my grandparents’, I heard “Smell’s Like Teen Spirit” on the radio for the first time, and suddenly I realized that there was a whole world of music for me that my parents wouldn’t like. This was an exciting time to be having that revelation, one of those moments when it seems like the industry doesn’t quite get what’s going on, so just about anything has a chance of finding its way onto the radio and MTV(RIP). I started riding my bike down to Backdoor Records, spending hours browsing their endless cardboard boxes of used records and CDs, and being influenced by the, often shockingly unforgiving, opinions that the guys who worked there were more than happy to share. Before long I had honed in on Dinosaur jr, despite having been unequivocally told that they had fallen off and hadn’t had a decent album since 1988, and they became the first band that I was truly passionate about. Really, I think they’re still the only band that’s ever been my proper favorite, at least for more than a few weeks at a time, but the desire that I felt to devour any scrap of information about them that I could find set the precedent for how I’ve approached pretty much any music that’s interested me ever since.

By the time I began my studies at Brown University, I was thinking of myself as someone who took music pretty seriously, both as a performer and as a fan. I joined the university chorus, signed up for some courses in the music department, and started to meet people who were just as nerdy about music as I was, more so in some cases. Music was coming more and more to occupy the center of my world, and so when the time came to declare a major, it seemed like the obvious choice. By the time I started college, my music tastes were already beginning to trend older, and this trend shifted into high gear when I started studying music in earnest. Through the music I was performing with the chorus, my classical music interests started to focus on composers from the 16th and 17th centuries like Willaert, Lasso, Gesualdo, and Monteverdi, which is still where I feel most at home as a singer and conductor, although I did eventually regain a strong appreciation for the more recent stuff. At the same time, through courses I was taking, conversations with other students and professors, and my own explorations, my rock interests were expanding to embrace early blues and country, R&B and soul, early rock ’n’ roll, the folk revival, and really pretty much anything from the middle decades of the 20th century. At that time I knew that I wanted to dedicate myself to music going forward, but I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to do with it, towards the end of my time at Brown, two of my professors, composer Gerald Shapiro and musicologist Rose Rosengard Subotnik, separately took me aside to tell me that they felt I had a gift for describing the relationships between musical style and historical context and that I should consider studying musicology.

After graduating from college I moved to Knoxville, TN, where I became intimately familiar with the bustling underground music scene that was happening there at the time, centering on the tiny but legendary venue, The Pilot Light. I also started attending musicology seminars at the University of Tennessee, where I think I learned more in a single year than I have at any other point in my life. Professors Rachel Golden, Leslie Gay, and Nasser Al-Taee welcomed me with open arms, helped me to get a job as a late night classical music DJ at the local NPR affiliate, WUOT, and encouraged me to apply to the Phd. program at UCLA, where I was accepted and began studying in the Fall of 2006.

Being in the musicology department at UCLA gave me the opportunity to study with some of the world’s most exciting music writers and thinkers, including Susan McClary, Robert Walser, Elisabeth Le Guin, Robert Fink, Ray Knapp, Elizabeth Upton, and my advisor Mitchell Morris, and to work closely as a teaching assistant for the music writer who has had the most profound influence on me, Elijah Wald. During my years in LA I had the opportunity to discuss, research, teach, and write about an extremely diverse array of music-related subjects, including Franz Liszt’s turbulent relationship to the Catholic Church, Al Green’s approach to the music of Hank Williams, what silent film musicians played when Jesus was on the screen, Monteverdi’s music for the end of a plague, Isaac Asimov’s depiction of musical affect as a weapon, and tensions between performers and critics in the early 16th century, just to name a few. In addition, I served as a member of the editorial board of ECHO: A Music-Centered Journal, where I had the privilege of facilitating the publication of some of the most exciting and adventurous music scholarship that was being done at the time; I was a performer and student conductor in the UCLA Early Music ensemble; and I spent a few hectic months as a member of the election committee of UAW Local 4811, the union that represents teaching assistants at the University of California.

I spent the last couple years of my time in LA putting together a dissertation placing the arrival in Venice of Adriano Willaert, a composer who really should get a lot more attention than he does, in the context of a wave of “renaissanceization” that was occurring in Venetian visual art, architecture, literature, and politics at the same time. I had my defense just before Christmas, 2014, and by the time I finished the final revisions a few months later, I had already moved to Germany. Two weeks before I officially received my Phd. that June. that, I became a father. Somewhere in there, I also started a new job teaching English, mostly to people who were having the State pay for their lessons while they looked for work. 

In less than six months, basically every aspect of my life had changed. This took a bit of adjustment, but it taught me a lot about my own resilience and adaptability. I’ve also learned a lot about myself and my potential from my experiences as a teacher. I’ve always considered myself to be a relatively shy person. When I first started teaching as a graduate student, I would physically shake and have so many butterflies in my stomach that I could hardly talk. As an English teacher I’ve rarely gone a day without meeting new students, and each time I’ve had to walk in with a smile, sit down, and get right to it, presenting myself not as an authoritarian figure, but certainly as a figure of authority. In the context of teaching I’ve met literally thousands of people, people of all nationalities, all ages, all occupations, all levels of language aptitude. I’ve mediated conflicts, listened to heart-wrenching life stories, and witnessed unpredictable friendships developing between people of such different backgrounds that they would probably never be together in the same room under normal circumstances. Teaching has also given me the opportunity to think about my language, how it works and how it’s used, and sometimes abused, to an extent that never would have been possible otherwise.

All this has been invaluable for me, both as an empathetic person and as a writer, but it didn’t take long before I was itching to reengage with music. I started toying with writing reviews, signed on as “musicologist in residence” at The Jelly Roll Factory, an organization intended to promote use and access to public domain songs and recordings that sadly never got off the ground, and started to get serious about playing the guitar. A little while after that I started my YouTube channel, Something About Music, for which I have written, presented, and edited videos on topics ranging from Medieval musical notation to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five to the rise of Hip Hop, and especially on the American Folk Revival, which has become a special pet topic for me.

After a few years of making videos, I realized that I wanted to take what I was doing in a direction that would let me engage more directly and immediately with what’s happening in the musical world, make contacts and form relationships with people who are doing things that excite me in and around music, and focus on writing and research, which are on the parts of the process that are most interesting and engaging for me. That brings me here. My experience and education with music and with people have given me the skills and expertise to write intelligently and hopefully entertainingly about any kind of music or musical activity from a critical, historical, journalistic and/or philosophical point of view, and that’s what I’m doing. On this website you can find my regular reviews of musical happenings around Hamburg, or wherever I happen to be, as well as articles, essays, interviews, program notes, and other writings. If you have, or represent, a band, ensemble, venue, record label, festival, music website, periodical, or publishing company, you can also find out how to contact me so that we can talk about how we might work together on anything from a tiny blurb to a major book project. 

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!