I suppose at some point I need to force myself to explain the last decade and a half - though I'm not sure I really understand it all myself.  Here's the reader's digest version:

After my album came out, I went on a long tour.  It wasn't like most tours, in that much of it wasn't even booked when I left.  I just took off in a van with my friend Dave Soyars one day, and my best friend and manager John Schillaci searched for gigs anywhere in the US for us to play.  The result was, we criss-crossed the country aimlessly for two months playing wherever they'd let me.   Some of the gigs were good, many were disasters.  We slept in the van in rest areas and showered at truck stops.  

The truth of the matter is that playing gigs in Los Angeles had become increasingly less and less fun.  In the early days people were always receptive to anything - but I'd noticed audiences gradually becoming more and more jaded.  I think I harbored the illusion that getting on the road would allow me to play to a more genuine kind of audience - so I was excited to go.  But the more I travelled the more I realized every town was more like LA than not.  Though a lot of things would soon happen in my life to pull me away from music - it cannot be denied that part of me was simply less into it than before.

At the same time, I'd met my soon-to-be wife Julie just before that tour.  I hated being away from her that long.  One of the prime motivators any songwriter has for writing songs is a desire for love and intimacy.  Now I had all that, and suddenly the biggest threat to it was my music career.  I didn't want to be one of those guys I'd seen out on the road.  Sad, weary and alone.  

I began to have real doubts about the career I'd started.

So when I got back, I took a little bit of time off before I started my follow-up album.  Eventually though I did get  motivated to record again.  I'd written a handful of songs I was proud of and had begun negotiating with producer John Simon (Leonard Cohen, The Band, Steve Forbert) to produce my follow-up.  He was willing to work on the meager budget my label could liely afford, but before we could submit a budget to Alias records, we got a letter from them informing us that they'd dropped me.  Why they decided to that, I don't know.  I'd been under the impression that my album sold pretty well for a singer-songwriter on an indy label - but I never did get an exact figure - so who knows?  What was clear was that without a label I wouldn't have the funds to work with a guy like John Simon.

Not one to let things get me down easily, I began to work with my buddy Randell Kirsch (Show of Hands) in his home studio.  If you've ever heard the version of Dancing Queen I released on Pravda records - Randell and I recorded that there. 

We worked hard on the new album.  I was proud of most of it, though I privately felt that it needed one or two weightier songs to be good enough for release.  But one night we mixed down what we though might potentially be a final version.  I handed it off to John Schillaci so that he could start shopping it around for a new label deal.

A few days later John was killed in an auto accident.

I don't know how to talk about John's impact on my life.  All these years later it still doesn't come easily to me.  Suffice to say the guy was like a brother to me.  Anything I was as a musician was at least half his doing.  I was devastated.  I simply couldn't imagine carrying on without him.

I ended up moving to Colorado taking jobs driving a bus driver and a dairy truck while I tried to figure things out.  A few months after we got there I was told that one of my other closest musical cohorts, Mike O'Leary (producer of "Alice Jean" on the Alias album) was dying of terminal cancer.  Mike was a really close friend, force of nature, and my most frequent bass player when I played with a band.  Like John, I can't do his influence on my life any justice.  I simply loved the guy dearly.  So I hopped on a plane and made it just in time to see him.  He died an hour after I visited him.

Losing two friends so deeply a part of my identity as a musician in such a short amount of time was far more than I knew how to deal with.  I kept telling myself I needed to pick myself up again and get to work, but I just couldn't find a way to do it.

Around this time Julie and I decided to start a family.  In a matter of months my daughter Everly was born. Six weeks after her birth I was paged by Julie at work and told to come quickly - Everly had stopped breathing.  I made it to the emergency room and found out that she was alive, but she'd had a seizure.  We spent the next few weeks in the hospital - finally being told that she had a profound brain malformation. The doctors did not want to offer any prognosis, but when they did it was not pretty.  She would not live past the age of two.  She would never sit up, or talk, or even recognize her parents.  When pressed, these were the kinds expectations we were told we could have.  She would simply live life as an infant and die of pneumonia at some point. 

I stopped thinking about returning to music.  I had other things on my mind.  Life became about survival.

But a funny thing happened.  Everly didn't die.  She thrived.  She learned to walk and learned sign language - and absolutely knows who her parents are.  She turned 10 years old last July, and now the doctors say that she has every chance of living a full life-span.  She is a happy, beautiful child - and though developmentally still about a two year old...there is nothing tragic about her.

So here I am today.  Beautiful wife.  Two beautiful daughters (Everly's sister Sophie is seven years old and in perfect health).  For the last decade I'd dedicated myself to my family's survival, then eventually beyond survival.  But it has only been in the last few months that I've allowed myself to consider the possibility of making music again.  Where that thought will lead me, I still don't know.  I still find that picking up the guitar brings up a lot of demons for me.  But I am picking it up again. That's a start.

Anyhow...that's why I disappeared.  I can't tell you how much it means to me that all these years later people still care enough to want to know what happened.