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I turned to records. This is when I heard Kate Bush for the first time. I had never heard anyone like her before. Still being quite vulnerable in my voice and having lost all my confidence, I, through hearing Kate, decided to nurse my voice back to full strength myself. I did this by listening for the weaknesses in my fragile voice. I decided that my weaknesses could make me distinct. I started to think of them as qualities that needed strengthening. “I worked each weakness to craft myself my very own ‘new’ voice”. I’m still in the works.


It was in this period that I formed a love for writing. I would muse up these long sprawling melodic tales that I would sing to myself as I walked or skated around town. The combination of writing for the first time and being in the blueprint stages with my voices had me writing incredibly idiosyncratic material.


Leaving the church opened a whole new world to me. I rambled the northwest coast down through the southwest for a span of 7 years. I call this chapter...’ My Life, as a Racoon’. I lived very close to the elements during this time. I lived in tents, yurts, barns, domes, converted chicken coupes etc. I rode my bike for transportation. I did a lot of dumpster diving, farming, building and whole lot of not giving a fuck about money. I was writing all the while and I always had musical friends. We would sing on porches and around fires and as we walked high desert roads.


These were very free, creative and fun times. After a season of this rambling, I decided that the time had come to settle down and actually focus on my music. So I decided to move back to California, fix up an old shack to live in and to start a band.


I found my shack in an apple orchard completely overgrown with brambles. The shack was inhabitable at first so I camped under the oldest apple tree in the orchard for the summer until the shack was liveable. That was lovely summer. Being a country kid from a sleepy town, I had very little insight on how to start working in music beyond playing in my local venue. I remember setting a distinct intention to find a mentor...not just for music but for life. It was at this point that by some means of magick that I met Tom Waits. Over the next five years I would play them (Tom and his wife) my demos, to which they would encourage me by saying ‘you should be very proud’.


At long last I delivered to them what I called ‘Sketch-work Songs’ which featured a song called Seed of Wonder. My growth as a writer was apparent in this song and Tom’s enthusiasm reflected that growth. Tom sent the ‘Sketch-work Songs’


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