A lot of folks believe that music should be played to or played for an audience.  I've always thought that the best music is played with an audience.  When a great groove sneaks into your soul and drags you feet first into a song, a connection between the performer and the listener is forged and there is a chance that each will grow from the experience of the other.  After all, making music is a human endeavor as old as time and has always served as a portal to other worlds, other ways of knowing.  In many ways, music is the grease for the engine of community.

In the end, no matter what musical genre I borrow from, I'm a folk musician.  Maybe more of a folkbluesrootsrocktroubadour (how's that grab ya?).  The way I see it, the music belongs to the people and I'm just lucky enough to be the conduit for it.  If asked what I call the kind of music I play, it's Piedmont Blues, a kind of fingerstyle blues guitar which originated in the Carolinas in the early 1900's and was the guitar player's equivalent to ragtime piano.  It is known for its syncopated bass lines and flashy treble runs and is a much sweeter sounding blues than its Delta cousin.  I don't think of it as a crying in your beer kind of blues.  This is a blues for dancing.  The key to the Piedmont Blues is the groove.  The groove has to draw the listener in and get them moving because once you get someone's body moving to the music, it's a hell of a lot easier to captivate their spirit.

As a student of the Piedmont style, I learned to play a lot of songs written by the masters, guys like Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Blake, Willie McTell, Jesse Fuller and Blind Lemon Jefferson.  I grew to love the one guitar, one voice approach to playing with an audience because of the intimacy of the whole arrangement.  And the Piedmont Blues allowed for a loose, spacious sound that felt fully developed and arranged at the same time.

Today, my writing is inspired by the best of the modern songwriters (blues and otherwise).  When I want to listen to something good, I reach for Richard Thompson, Chris Smither, Alan Hull or Eliza Gilkyson.  I still love the music of my own youth, from the Beatles and the Moody Blues to the Zombies, Lindisfarne and Procul Harum.  These were songs that tried to dig deeper into the human psyche, to find out what really makes us tick.  If there is a limitation to the old blues tunes, it is in the old way of writing lyrics.  The "I woke up this morning with a hole in my head" lyricism of the old blues just doesn't quite get to the core of what it is to be a modern human; I want to understand and reveal and live in the shoes and hearts of the people I meet and know and love.  I think that is what is worth writing about.  I think it is what is worth singing about.  And I think it is what might bring all of us a little  bit closer to the truth.