An award-winning composer and performer who has had several albums in the Billboard Top 20, two PBS specials, and his top five songs on Spotify alone have a combined total of over a million streams. Based in Los Angeles, he is a Lifetime Member of the Recording Academy, and has authored a book that just came out last month titled, “Tuned In: Memoirs of a Piano Man,” which has hit Number 1 on Amazon in multiple categories and gotten over 40 endorsements from A-list celebrities, including the likes of David Foster, Barry Manilow, Diane Warren, Martin Short, Ray Romano, and Ed Begley, Jr., among others.
“The original thing that brought me to Los Angeles was to become the next Jackson Browne. And I instead became the next Jackson Browne piano tuner.”
“Los Angeles… is an amazing town but it'll eat you up if you're not really focused and I came out here and my piano tuning business really took off and I got to start working with some of the greats just kind of right out of the gate.”
“Here I am in Colorado at Dan Fogelberg's ranch – it’s one of my half a dozen visits to his ranch to work on his piano and install a midi adapter in his piano – I'm sitting at the piano and I'm playing this piece and he goes, ‘Wait, what is that?’ I said, ‘Well, it's just a little thing I'm working on.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that's beautiful. Maybe I could do a lyric to it’.”
“Now instead of focusing on, you know, writing pop songs, what about writing stuff that I love to play and that maybe will bring me spiritual gratification? So, it was a big turning point for me.”
“One moment, one gesture, one phone call, one chance encounter can change the direction of your whole life.”
“Guitar, you know, me finding a way to discover music on my own terms, it did give me an on-ramp to this thing called music. And it gave me an identity. It gave me a way to process my emotions and feelings of insecurity and morph them into music and turn, you know, poison into medicine.”
“I've come to appreciate that I do what I do, and if it reaches the right people, then I fulfilled my mission as an artist.”
“75 million streams, my music, I think the right people are connecting with it.”
“It sort of killed the group aspect of it and there's definitely something to be said about being in the same room with a bunch of people and you're looking at the drummer, and the bass player does a riff where you go, ‘Oh, how cool is that?’ And that kind of inspires you and you play off of each other. So, that's, that's what's missing in that regard in terms of the new world order of everything sort of being in the box. And there is a bit of a trend of people going, ‘You know, let's just go back to live and let's all go in the studio and record something together’.”
“Most amazing was being flown to England a dozen times by the likes of McCartney and Elton and Phil Collins and Keith Emerson, et cetera.”
“For that one to hit number two on the Billboard charts, it was just like the greatest feeling in the world. And I thought, okay, well, that's it. And then the next week it hit number two again… And I had a few albums that went to number 21 or number eight or whatever. But for that one to hit number two and stay there for a couple of weeks was really meaningful for me.”
“Music was my salvation because I was a very diffident, insecure kid and struggling for a way to fit in… it gave me an identity and a way to process my feelings of insecurity.”
“To have a momentary loss of face and to be embarrassed temporarily is a far less worse fate than dying with a dream in your heart.”
“How much credit have I earned? What's in the bank account of my worth as a human being and how much have I earned their respect over the years?”
“Northern Seascape”
“My Mother’s Son”