I grew up in Montana. I was born in Minnesota May 18, 1971 in a town called Wadena, which is in the middle of the state, south of the cities.

Well, first I moved to Yellowstone National Park. My parents were seasonal workers there, so we lived in Yellowstone for 4 or 5 months out of every year until I was 14 years old. In the wintertime we went to various places, we’d start out in California some place like Santa Barbara and then by the time I was in kindergarten we were spending our winters in Montana. We lived on a ranch in Cinnabar Basin just outside of Yellowstone and we lived in Missoula and then we lived in Bozeman from the time I was in 2^nd grade on through the year after I graduated from high school.

It was a large cattle ranch and my dad was the winter keeper there... and basically just fed the cattle and mended the fences. It was very desolate – we drove a couple miles up this canyon until the snow got too deep and then we would take the snow mobile the last couple of miles to where the ranch was, so it was really remote.

My mother’s side of the family is all very musical. My grandfather was a minister and he had this incredible tenor voice and my grandmother played piano, my mother played piano – she was a music major in college until she got pregnant with me. My uncle is a band director and my mother’s sister also started out as a music major and plays piano, flute and guitar, so it’s a really musical family on my mom’s side.

I didn’t pick up the guitar until I was a teenager, but when I was growing up I always knew I was going to be a musician – I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know I was going to be a musician. I would drag all the pots and pans out of the cupboard and set up my own drum set. I’d hang the pot lids from the ceiling on strings to use as cymbals! And my dad’s contribution was that he was always listening to music, he was like the quintessential stoner hippy guy putting on headphones in the back yard listening to Dark Side of the Moon and Bob Dylan and The Who, Led Zepplin and the Rolling Stones and all that stuff. My dad always really encouraged me to sing. I remember once he told me that one of the most important things that he could do was to listen to me sing. That made a huge impression on me when I was five years old of course – you know my dad telling me that it was really important that he listen to me sing. I actually believe that... the fact that my dad encouraged me and planted the seed that music was a way I could communicate with him, or get to him – that really kind of cemented the whole deal for me. It was like a way to be with all of my family.

Yes and no, I mean, it was all around cause I was in Montana and Wyoming, so it all over the place. In Montana and Wyoming kids are allowed into bars as long as they're with their parents or guardian. And my parents were young parents so they went out to bars a lot and took me along. I would hear lots of live music in the bars, so it could be blues, it could be rock-n-roll it could be country – a lot of country [laughs]. There was also a lot of bluegrass and blues on the radio when I was growing up so I heard a lot of that sound growing up and infused that with the typical baby boomer generation rock-n-roll folk music.

I started music lessons as a 5^th grader outside of school, and I was in the band program at school of course, but I started taking drum lessons – that was my first instrument, drums, percussion… before I was in the band at school. And then I played drums and percussion in the band all the way through high school. Then I got into the choir as well and picked up a guitar – saved up all summer long at a summer job when I was 16 or 17 years old to buy my first guitar and amplifier.

That’s a good question because I always knew I wanted to be a musician, but I didn’t know if I was gonna be a drummer or a guitar player or what. I kinda knew it wasn’t gonna be drums cause I didn’t want to be in the back and I wanted to be able to move around more [laughs] but I loved rhythm too. There was a guitar around our house and I just started playing it and playing it and playing it and playing it. It was my stepfather’s guitar and I didn’t know how to tune it, I didn’t know how to do anything but I just kept playing it for like 4 months. Finally my mother got sick of listening to me play a guitar that I didn’t know anything about, or how to tune it or anything. So she sat down with me and gave me my first guitar lesson, which was how to tune a guitar and how to play D, C, and G [laughs]. That was about when I was 15 years old. And then from there I started studying music theory with a jazz bass player when I was 17, after I bought my first guitar. So there was a year where I just kind of played – I got a chord book and figured out what chords I could and then I bought my first electric guitar and amplifier. And then when I was about 17 I started studying jazz with a guy named Rob Kohler in Bozeman, who’s a jazz bass player. And he introduced me to all kinds of concepts – and this goes back to what I was talking about earlier about not being afraid to blur boundaries in music – because he was very strongly rooted in that as well. My first lesson with Rob Kohler was him trying to get across the fact that there are actually no wrong notes— and it’s all what you do with every note and how strongly you play it and what your intention is behind it and how you resolve it, how you approach it. And that’s a pretty advanced lesson for somebody who at that point knew nothing about music theory. But he was trying to get to me on a more "find your own voice" kind of level and then he infused that with learning scales and chord harmony, how chords are built, chord progressions and that kind of thing. From there I went on to major in music at college.

Yeah, I started at Montana State as a composition major and I was studying classical guitar. And I did that for a year before I moved out to Portland to play in a rock-n-roll band. And it was frustrating being a music major at Montana State because they were really geared toward turning out teachers, music teachers and band directors. And I knew from the first moment that that’s not what I wanted to do.

Well, yeah that and that the music industry’s not rooted in Bozeman Montana [laughs].

Yeah there were a couple of musicians that were a year or two older than I was, Rob Lehrkind and Holiday Inn (it’s not his real name, he slowly changed it over time), who lived out here and they called me up and asked me if I wanted to come out and join their band. And I said, "you bet!" I was going to go to Berklee School of Music in Boston, and as soon as they called me, that all changed and I came out here and within a few months of being out here was playing Satyricon and all the punk clubs with Tao Jones.

Yeah, Absolutely. I totally loved it, totally loved it. And that music was great—it was high energy music and it was right at the level I needed to be. It really pushed my playing abilities and my chops. It was exciting and it was young and it was vibrant and rocking with minimal improvisation involved because I didn’t yet have enough theoretical framework to really be an effective improviser, just enough to improvise a little bit, but the music had enough opportunity to expand that it was still exciting enough so it pushed me just at the right level and the right place – it was a lot of fun! [laughs]

Yeah, after the break up of Tao Jones I decided I wanted to pursue jazz full time. This was after a couple of other things – first I was playing in an African Highlife band with Kpani Addy who’s Obo Addy’s nephew. So I did that for a few months, started taking lessons from Dan Faehnle, a jazz guitar player. Highlife is African dance music, but modern, electrified and with very specific beats and stylistically the guitars are very high and lyrical. A real popular example of some of it is the backing band on Paul Simon’s Graceland. Some of it, not all of it is an example of Highlife style, like Diamonds on The Souls of Her Shoes – of course that’s not pure highlife cause it’s Paul Simon. But if you go hear Obe Addy play, that’s highlife-- happy dance music, very happy dance music.

I didn’t really get into the blues until after I got into jazz –

Yeah, musically, Africa’s influence is larger I think, than any other continent’s influence. You know Europe’s contribution is the codifying and certain type of music theory where you can change keys and that kind of harmonic end of it. Africa’s all about the rhythm and the soloing and playing together as a community. And European music is more about the soloist and it being codified and being correct. African music generally doesn’t change keys. It always stays in the same key so the song has this one feeling from beginning to end. And European music’s classical contribution is that you can change keys. And jazz is like the fusing of that African approach to improvising and playing as a group, infusing that with the theoretical framework to be able to change keys and rhythms and everything mid song or several times in a song, so it’s really the fusing of that. But if you were to weigh the two, Africa’s influence on world music is larger than anything else.

After Tao Jones broke up I felt a real disconnect, I was kind of at a loss. I didn’t know what to do. Tao Jones couldn’t be recreated and I wasn’t sure what to do musically, and so I jumped in and started studying jazz and going to school. And I went and played jazz full time for 4 years or more and that’s all I played, that’s all I listened to. I totally immersed myself in it and wasn’t listening to any kind of roots music, no acoustic music other than acoustic jazz. No rock-n-roll or anything. I was just totally immersed in it 100% and learning everything I could about it. I wanted to be a really great jazz player. But the thing is... there is a mold now of jazz players, if you go to school especially-- and it’s not to say that you can’t break that mold because that’s the spirit of what you do in any style of music and jazz especially. But I think my background all combined with my natural feel and musical… you know the musical vibration that comes from my body, meaning my natural tendencies – where my ear wants to go where my body feels the beat, everything like that. My feel and personality, everything about me I guess doesn’t lend itself to fitting into that style really effectively. It’s an example of being able to learn all the theory behind it and all of the right ways to go about playing, but not be able to play it from my heart, and play it in a way that people in the audience know I’m playing from my heart. And so I felt that, and felt that disconnect and that was very disenchanting for me. It was one of those moments when you realize that you can’t do everything and you’re not invincible. I spent all that time and energy and I played in a band, toured, and did everything I could to make it happen. And there were moments where I achieved it but it kept slipping away. And I got to a crossroads where I was like, OK I could go on with this and devote myself to getting in there, but I felt that if I did that I would never reach the point of consistency and artistic expression – mostly artistic expression – that I would want to. I felt like I would end up being another pretty good jazz player, but not a great jazz player – certainly not somebody who can push boundaries on something. So I figured if I’m not going to be able to get to that level then it’s not worth it for me, or anybody else, because who’s going to want to buy those albums and go see that music. And there are thousands of those players out there, you can hear them all the time on the radio and in the clubs and so I felt pretty disenchanted. I didn’t know what to do musically, I didn’t have any direction and so I quit playing music altogether for 2 years and in that time I figured I needed to make a living since I didn’t know what the hell I was gonna do artistically. So I went on and got a degree in business and as I was graduating I still wasn’t playing guitar at all really – other than learning a few folk songs or learning Beatles’ songs in my living room, playing for nobody else. I had a musical crisis, and it turned me away from music. And the minus was that I had to go to the corporate world, but the plus side of it was that I was always a terrible business person before that, I knew nothing about business. And I’m not saying that I’m a great business person now, but since I went to business school at least I know how it works, and I feel like some holes have been plugged there. So I graduated from Portland State with a major in business administration and marketing and a minor in music. So I went to Supertracks as an intern my senior year of college and I wasn’t looking for a music company per se, I was looking for a technology start-up company because that was the thing that was happening at the time. And the dogma of the day was that you join one of those companies and you’ll get ahead faster and you’ll make a lot of money.

I was there for the money and for the knowledge, the educational experience… and because I had lost my way. I totally had lost my way at that point. I didn’t know what to do. My decisions were based more on external factors such as money, than they were based on internal factors such as what my heart wanted to do.

There are lots of connections there. Their original approach was to work with the major labels and secure content. And they were horribly uninformed, and inexperienced as to how the music industry worked, and the power of the major labels and all of that. And anybody who’s in the music industry knows that it’s different in a lot of ways than any other business and a lot more strange than any other business. And Supertracks took a real heavy top-down approach, and markets don’t work that way, generally speaking. You can’t say this is how it’s going to work and then impose the will of your company on the people unless you happen to be the government. And they of all people ought to know that’s not the way the capitalist system works. What works is: you see what the people want and then you develop something to help them get what they want, and you act as the middle man. Supertracks wasn't doing that, they were taking the approach of: we’re going to make people buy music this way. That’s just not going to happen, and especially as all of the trading programs came about. You know, if people are able to get it for free, they’re going to do that. Supertracks thought they saw a problem, which was a significant drop in CD sales amongst a certain age group which happened to be more technologically savvy and they were just trading files on the internet. So that’s what they perceived to be the problem, and they perceived the answer to be to make it so that they were unable to do that.

Musicians are incredibly empowered now more than they have been in decades since the formation of the recording industry, because musicians are now able to record and distribute their music and promote their music without a major label. And there are several channels and ways to go about doing that. And it’s really a saturated market, both in terms of musicians and in terms of distributors and independent labels, so nobody really has an advantage at this point – everyone has certain strengths. I mean the record labels have the strength of money and established distribution chains and incredible marketing skill— mostly because of money and those established relationships. Independent artists have the ability to do all that recording and whatnot very inexpensively, which is the main thing that labels used to pay for. Musicians can now market and distribute themselves relatively inexpensively and develop enough of a following to make a living and get close to middle class which is what you’re seeing more and more. Especially a lot of the very successful artists, like Aimee Mann, are jumping off the major labels and onto their own independent labels which they’re forming themselves and reaping the benefits – they’re not giving away 80% of every sale to a music label.

It may be. To me it really doesn’t matter because industries come and industries go, and people are always hurt when they go, but whenever an industry goes, another industry pops up in its place, and you have to adapt. And as a live musician, especially someone who years ago when I started playing lap slide guitar, decided that my main focus was to be a live musician and that everything supports that because that’s where I connect most with the music is in a live setting in front of people – that that has less effect on me. If people want to trade my files I welcome them to do it because I want people to hear the music and mostly I want them to come out and hear the show.

I don’t think that any one who's gotten to the position of say Metallica, (one of the bands who are really anti-file sharing), has gotten to the position they’re in by not working hard. So they feel entitled to the money from their album sales. But the thing they have to realize is that although they’re entitled to the money from their album sales and from their art, there’s a force at work greater than that, which is the people’s choice. And when people are enabled to make a choice, it doesn’t matter what your opinion is. No matter what the history was like before, it’s different now…. you don’t have a choice but to adapt…. You can build a house but it can come tumbling down at any time and you have to be ready to build it again…. I think that’s why there are a lot of musicians who are Buddhists – they realize the impermanence of things.

No, I don’t feel that it hurts me. I feel that the more people hear it the better. If I sell a million records, that’s fantastic. But if I don’t sell a million records but every time I play I have 500 or a thousand people coming out to hear me… what the hell am I complaining about? That I didn’t make that extra million dollars?! [laughs]

No, I don’t think it’s as strong. I still think that it’s there in a lot of ways because it’s a long and twisted and difficult road whether you go independent or you go with a major label. And in a lot of senses being with a label makes things easier because they do a lot of things for you and in that sense, they should be compensated, and compensated well, because they take a big risk on you as an artist. You can go either way on that. I think that desire’s still there, but I do think that it’s lessened somewhat, and the musicians are more empowered.

There are a few things in play, one of them is disenchantment with the labels and this ability of the musicians to record themselves and put themselves out. And the file sharing – sure that eats into sales, but you have to adapt. And the thing is that, with all of this new technology happening, there’s a total saturation of music and musicians. And since there’s more, there’s more crap, and there’s more good stuff, and there’s maybe even more great stuff and so it’s really hard for any musician to differentiate themselves whether their on a major label or they’re on their own label, independently. So I think that’s another thing that plays into that: the market has changed significantly in terms of the technology and distribution channels and where the money comes from. But it’s also changed in that the number of bands and artists has grown so much that people can get kind of apathetic if there are millions of musicians around and all this good to mediocre music and a few more great musicians.

In the future, file sharing is going to become more and more prevalent – it’s already made a huge impact obviously on the music industry and that’s just going to continue to grow. And bands are taking advantage of this – and this is one advantage I see to the approach of thinking of myself and billing myself as a live performing artist as opposed to a recording artist exclusively or relying on that to be my main medium. I see opportunities especially for bands and artists who do a lot of improvisation and always change their performance up so that it’s not so choreographed all the time. To be able to sell, right after a song or concert is performed, a file recording of that performance where people will have that immediate connection with the music because they were there the first time it was performed like that, or when it was performed in this particular way and maybe they’re even on the recording in some way and they’ll have that personal connection with it and they’ll be able to take that home with them. I think that’s an incredible opportunity for artists. There are bands that are already doing that, right now. And as that technology becomes more and more refined and compact and easy to use, the more that’s going to happen, and I think that’s going to have an even larger impact on album sales – cause certain bands will decide to not even record albums. And honestly, I don’t want albums to go away, or at least studios. I don’t think studios will ever go away, because there’s a certain kind of magic that can happen in a studio that can’t happen in a live setting. So there’s magic that happens in each realm that’s unique to that setting. So people will still want both, but that fact alone, that live recordings themselves are going to become more and more prevalent is going to make a huge difference in the music industry and for how musicians approach the industry.

I have no idea. It’s up to them, if they can adapt or not. They might start writing in clauses that say that you can sell these live recordings but since we’re giving out these promotional services for you and co-sponsoring your tour, or however they’re going to change their angle, you know, ‘we’re infusing money into you this way so you have to give us a return on your sales this way’ or something like that. But it’s certainly going to, and already is empowering the artists into a different bargaining position and the more experienced artists recognize that already and are using it. But the flip side of that is that, again, there’s going to be more of an infusion of music at every level of the spectrum. You know, it used to be that when the recording industry was younger, in the golden age of the major labels, since the resources to put out and market albums were limited to a certain group of people and companies, the quality of what was released was higher because no one could do it at home. So that’s the flip side of it, because now that bar is lowered anybody can put out anything. And again that works in favor of musicians who hone their craft as live performers.

After that bubble burst [Supertracks], I quickly got another job as a quality assurance engineer with Transcorp Commercial Services and was moving right along up the corporate ladder without a problem. And that job was a big jump in pay for me, and a big jump in responsibility and my manager liked me a lot and was recommending me above my peers for the lead position and it was all really positive. It enabled me to learn a lot, and it enabled me to buy a house. But in that time, I discovered lap slide guitar and as soon as that happened, as soon as I put the guitar on my lap, the very first time I did that I was out at Breitenbush Hot Springs and it was the day after Deva’s and my anniversary. We were out there to celebrate our anniversary and I brought my guitar along and I put it on the side and tuned it to an open D and used a butter knife or something like that to just slide around a little bit. And it sounded so pretty, and it sounded so yearning, like a human voice. And I was like, wow that sounds great! So I had a slide made and I had my guitar adjusted and within two days I had gone from not playing music at all and not even really thinking about it, just having it as something I did in my living room every now and then, to fully deciding that I was going to quit my job and be a professional lap slide guitar player! [laughs] And it was very much like a religious awakening, because all my life up until I had that musical crisis, I knew I wanted to be a musician, but that whole time I never felt home. I never felt like I was home – I felt close, but I never felt like I was there. It was like I was in a relationship with this woman and she was great, but she wasn’t the one, you know? So it was like I found the one that I wanted to marry. And it was a total awakening and it changed everything in my life. It changed everything, the career path, the plans, my priorities, my relationship with Deva, everything, everything. It’s an example of the universe giving you what you need whether or not you know it. And you have to go through these things. So that happened and immediately I started feeling more comfortable with myself and my surroundings and the music, and it no longer became the important musical goal for me to be the best whatever. It just felt like all of a sudden I was able to really express myself. And that to me is the key: if I can express myself to you, or to an audience through performance especially, or through recorded performances, than that’s a total success. And if I can do that from the heart… well that’s the only way you can do it. And so now all of a sudden, I found the way that I could do that… and here I am. [laughs]

I feel that I’m getting more successful all the time.

Well it’s always surprising when you have a dream and you start working on it and parts of it start to work out. Of course it’s never how you envisioned it totally, or almost never, but it’s still a really big charge and a great feeling when it does work out in some way. And it is a big surprise. When you go after something and you’re chasing a dream there are a million naysayers, and people telling you you’re crazy to quit your fifty thousand dollar a year job and pursue something as unstable as music for anywhere from $35 to $150 a night at the beginning level – and then dream that you’re going to make it up that ladder. Especially since it’s not like any other corporate industry where there is an actual ladder – you have to build your own ladder and then climb it – and you have to build that ladder as you’re climbing it! [laughs] And then there’s also the other end of it where you have to stay artistically relevant, especially to yourself. There’s always a pull to do something commercial, you know? And you hear that when an artist will come out with something radio friendly because they’re ready to sell a bunch of records, but then no one buys it because they can tell that it’s not as real as their last album. And there’s always that pull because you always want to expand your audience naturally but you have to divide that, or make those decisions based on your artistic integrity or stance, and that’s a difficult balancing act. And to do that and stay relevant not only to yourself, but to a crowd of people because musical fads come and go. You could be playing from your heart but play a style of music that is just in today and out tomorrow, and you go from playing big festivals to playing for nobody and you have to be able to weather that. All of the musicians who’ve lasted have gone through periods of a decade or decades where their music has fallen out of favor, and they still manage to stay an artist, and stay true to their music and wait till that wave comes around. It’s not like a job where you climb up the ladder and you reach success and it just keeps getting more and more successful. Like you become manager, then mid-level management, CEO, chairman of the board, you start three other companies, you move on to become a politician and you keep climbing up the ladder. It’s not like that. It’s like you climb up the wave, and then the wave goes down, and then you go back up and the wave goes a little bit higher maybe and then it goes down and maybe the next wave is a little bit smaller, and you have to be able to surf. So in the end you have to be dedicated to your heart, and that’s why you have to be there. And that might mean that success for you means that you are playing from your heart but you have to wait tables to make ends meet – or it might mean that you’re playing from your heart and you’re wildly successful, or anywhere in between.