About Me

Faith

I worship at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in West Allis, WI where I sing and play guitar in the Trinity Praise Band. Holy Trinity is an ELCA congregation. I was born and raised Lutheran.

When I was young and we had four small children, my wife Katie and I were looking for a church. One Sunday, when my wife Katie returned from a visit to a startup church and told me they needed a guitar player for their Christian Praise band. Initially, I flat out refused to consider it, then two hours later, to my surprise, I found myself at band rehearsal, and I’ve been playing and singing Christian praise music in church ever since. I consider this day to be my Calling, and it still feels mysterious when I think about it.

Every day I ask myself, “What would Jesus do?”, and I try to get a little bit better.

Music

Music has been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. My mom sang to me and was the church’s children’s choir director, so I was in the choir from day one. I have very early memories of adult choir rehearsal with me crawling around the pews with the pastor’s son. I can still hear Britt’s First Lutheran choir rehearsing the Hallelujah Chorus.

In elementary school, I had a very inexpensive plywood guitar, but it was good enough for learning, and I learned to play so I could accompany myself singing the folk songs of the 1970s.

On my 18th birthday, my soulmate Katie Scott gave me a nice classical guitar that I still play today. She bought it with her own corn detasseling money, which means hours and hours of her toil and sweat are in that guitar. Two years later we were married.

In my thirties, I joined a series of semi-pro classic rock bands where I had fun and made some great friends, but I also learned that closing bars down at 2 am is not for me, and earning $50/gig is not enough.

Over the years I’ve done a lot of home music recording. I even recorded, mixed, and mastered a CD at my house in the late 1990s. The music wasn’t great, but the sound quality was very good, and I foresaw how producing one’s own music without the help of a studio would eventually turn the music industry upside down.

I also published mp3 files of my songs on my website and gave the songs away for free, before Napster, before Itunes, anticipating the music industry disruption that streaming music would cause.

I still record music at home, mostly songs for church, and I am always working on a new song.

Photography

My children are all excellent athletes. This isn’t surprising since their mother was first team all conference in 4 different sports, and I grew up with a coach as a father. I always enjoyed shooting photos of my children’s activities, but I got very frustrated trying to shoot sports with my early 2000s point and shoot camera. Everything was blurry because the shutter speeds were just too slow. So I bought a Nikon D70, some fast lenses, and learned how to use them, accumulating tens of thousands of photographs of our kids and their friends competing, and sharing on social media.

As my children have grown, with fewer athletic events to photograph, I’ve shifted to nature and macro photography, and I’m learning about birds. Katie has some diverse gardens that attract butterflies and bees, which in turn attract my camera.