The quick introduction is that I’m effectively a finance guy who writes songs. That said, I came from a family of successful musicians going back a long way on my mother’s side. My grandmother, Adelaide Anderson, founded the first accredited school of music in the Northwest US, and was a member of the National Piano Teachers’ Guild Hall of Fame. My mom, Heidi Brouhard (known as Heidi McCole while I was growing up), played in the Honolulu and Oregon Symphonies for 25+ years, and played a show for a billion people as a member of the orchestra for Elvis’s Aloha From Hawaii concert (she’s still getting residuals, 40+ years later!). I studied the piano for years…and then went into Finance. I’m the black sheep of the musical side of my family.
My goal is to write 12 ‘as-good-as-I-can-make-them’ songs a year, and I view it as a serious pursuit. To be clear, writing a song is not important to me. Writing a GOOD song is. And, unquestionably, I fail far more often than I succeed (those won’t be posted…I hope). None of this is easy—I find that writing good songs is really, really hard. There’s a reason our favorite artists fall back over time–it’s difficult to not repeat yourself, and it’s difficult to keep the focus on writing if you’re constantly performing and reminding yourself of what you’ve done before.
I should note that I’m not necessarily the narrator of the lyrics in all cases. Some of the songs are written from the perspective of someone talking to me, not me to them. Also…don’t assume they’re all about my life, either as the narrator or the subject. Song inspirations literally come from everywhere. As one of my favorite artists once sang…”I’d sell my soul, or your souls, for a song.” 🙂
I’ve had debates with my friends and family for years about what to do with this work. One friend specifically asked me “do you want to be rich, or do you want to be famous?” The answer is…neither. I want people to be able to get access to the songs and, hopefully, find some personal value in them.
