My style in music composition is obviously influenced by some well recognized artists and forms: Mozart, Gioachino Rossini,  Todd Rundgren,  Frank Zappa, Carla Bley, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Carl Stalling, Thomas Newman, Van Dyke Parks, Harry Partch, Silvestre Revueltas and Charles Ives; Gypsy music, Klezmer, Qawalli, Qasidah, Ghazals and Taqsim,   Brazilian Foro, Portuguese Fado, Mexican Conjunto, Soukous, and various folk idioms from around the world. Currently I've been listening to a lot of Cafe Tacuba and some really great, lively guitar music from Mali and South Africa.

    My best friend, Richard Anderson, and I shared a love for strange bands that played unusual songs with curious subject matter in odd and experimental tempos. For me it was Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention (which my oldest sister introduced me to) and City Boy, a band from England. For him it was BeBop Deluxe, also from England, and Crack The Sky, from Ohio. We hit it off socially and musically and, fresh out of high school, formed a musical collaboration/ band and wrote our own music and lyrics, following the model of Fagen and Becker of Steely Dan. The band fell somewhere off-center of punk, power pop, and new wave, with a delight for montage-like experimentation with differing styles (I ask you- have you ever heard a Calypso-Punk version of Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance before?). Through the next several years- and several name changes, from Little Baby Strangers, A Soft Zoo, and Freaks Amor- we worked and played with some interesting and talented musicians in the area- The Reactors, The Neophonics, The Avatars, Pagan Myth,  Montage, Cabazon Dinosaurs, The Unforgiven and some folks who would later form Camper Van Beethoven. Our home quickly turned into an artist commune, first with Casa de Cara in San Bernardino and then the Mellow Manor in Riverside, which was also home to Spike & Mike's Animated Film Festival. We recorded a couple records of original material and remained largely unnoticed except by local artists and party goers. We did get to open twice for Suburban Lawns, a punk band from Los Angeles who we mysteriously got hooked up with and who seemed to enjoy our music.

    The most influential person I met during this time was Jack Johnson. He was brought in to play bass for us and quickly became our artistic mentor and creative muse. Jack was the sort of person who could do anything and was suspicious of formal education. Mostly self taught in everything he did, he studied dance when he was in college and then taught himself music so that he could understand dance better. He often showed up at our house with an instrument he'd never played before that he'd just picked up at a pawn shop and would have it figured out in a few minutes, or with raw materials, like hollow bars of iron which he cut into varying lengths to build a make-shift gamelan with. Through him I discovered another world of sound which was only hinted at in my attraction to foreign music, and he introduced me to microtonal and serial composition, atonality, foreign and experimental tunings, and through him I discovered the composers John Cage, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. If we accomplished anything of note in our music it was all due to his inspiration, encouragement and guidance. My waning interest for playing contemporary music continued to grow. I eventually decided that it wouldn't benefit anyone, particularly myself, to pursue something that I didn't enjoy, and I eventually left the world of music to concentrate on writing.

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