Background

I was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts on December 21, 1964. My Mom tells me that as a baby I liked "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures and Bacharach & David's "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head." My parents always had good musical tastes; there weren't many other people in our neighbourhood listening to Robert Johnson, Chris Connor and Herb Albert in a single evening. My Dad had a Sammy Davis Jr. Greatest Hits record that I loved too. Sometimes he'd put the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack on loud enough that the Skylab crew could hear it. I never thought much about playing an instrument when I was little; baseball and Sci-Fi shows were my major kicks but I think even then I was filing away themes and soundtracks I liked. If anyone's interested, the first record I ever bought was the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever in 1978. In the summer of 1979 a friend turned me onto the Beatles, Stones and Led Zeppelin and soon after I asked my father for a guitar. A Berklee jazz guy named Steve Claflin taught me how to learn solos off of records. Mike Keegan (Eddie Van Halen's former guitar tech and an amazing player himself) was a friend of mine in high school and he taught me a few things too. Some of the guys who really made me want to get it together were Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, Elliot Easton and Hendrix. I heard an 8-track tape of Jimi's "Smash Hits" in the early 1980s and thought it was from another planet. I later got into Mark Knopfler and through him discovered people like Chet Atkins, JJ Cale, Lightning Hopkins and tons of other blues cats. I never stuck with guitar lessons for too long but learnt a lot off of records. During the 1980s I gigged a lot around New England with various bands hoping to get a record contract. Things didn't work out and I wound up in the US Navy. I got turned on to a lot of stuff like indie, early rap, jazz and even some country while serving - good experience. Following my discharge in 1989 I moved to Milan. During the 1990s I married my wife Teresa, decided to get serious about the guitar and started writing and recording my own material. In 1999 I got my first break. I was asked to do some guitar instrumentals for a popular Italian television show called "Le Iene" and these were used as backing music for several years. I started to get more interested in the idea of composing for film and television but I put those ideas on hold when Grammy-winning producer Scott Mathews got in touch with me in 2003. He said he wanted to do a record together and that was an offer I just couldn't refuse. I learnt a lot about the business and the studio from the experience. I had no luck getting a deal though and decided to get my own home studio together in 2005 while working on a children's music project of all things. In 2006 I packed in live gigging and decided to focus my energies on recording soundtrack material. The past five years have been "educational" to say the least but I'm really happy with the way things are going and with the material I'm doing. Slowly but surely I'm finding some doors opening and particularly in the last year I've had several songs published. A week seldom goes by that I don't learn some new production or recording trick. Mainly, I try to have fun. It's a great feeling when someone wants to use your music for a project, whether it's a reality show, film or multimedia project. I wouldn't want to spend my time doing anything else.