On Mondays, for the next 27 (!) weeks, my goal is to post a few pictures of my music making as a “singer/songwriter.” One post per year. With light commentary.

1987was the year I started playing Viola in the South Bend Hay Elem. school Orchestra. But even before that, I made up songs as a boy. In ’91 and ’92, Dad brough home antique Pump Organs. Those were game changers; so was the upright piano in ’93. And ’94 & ’95 were the years, with the help of a hand-made chord chart my Mom gave me, and a “Teach Yourself Guitar” book my Dad gave me for Christmas when I was 17, I began my life long relationship with Guitar.

I wrote songs of my own before I learned other people’s songs.

In 1996, around the time of my 18th birthday, I began to use my sister’s Magnavox AM/FM Cassette player to record the songs I had been writing. (That’s Betsy’s finger in the lens of the camera in the photo above.) The execution was as primitive as the production, but the ideas were good. Some of them anyway. I called my first album “Perfecta” as a nod to my favorite band Adam Again. I think my brother Jon may be the only other human besides me to have ever listened to it. But more importantly, I found I couldn’t-not write. Many things, both within and beyond me wanted to be expressed. Half a year later, for the first time ever, I played for people on an Open-Mic stage.

In the student center of Indiana Wesleyan University, with equal parts swagger and stage fright, I debuted to the world. My Dad’s old classical guitar, which I brought to college, had broken tuning knobs. So I borrowed a new guitar from a girl named Lora. But another girl, who had a crush on me, named Elizabeth, took the picture above. She used her Panasonic dual-tape deck to make an audio recording of the song I played: an original called “Open Road.” To my amazement people liked it. Participants were supposed to only do one song, but in the applause I asked “Do we have time for one more?” The sound engineer nodded and I followed up with R.E.M.’s “The One I Love.” It didn’t bring down the house, but it lifted my spirits.

My future wife and I. (photo credit, Brian Bradford, my roommate.) My all-thrift-store attaire atracted one heckler to yell “Weezer!” when I took the stage. I took it as a compliment.

If you ever talk me to about the mess I made of my undergraduate studies, the first time around, I often make a remark about how I went to college not to be a music education major, not really, but to meet a really cool girl and start a really cool band. Life is funny, you know. In the first semester, I met Elizabeth in September and by November, my orchestra viola stand partner, Daniel Lambert and I were forming an alternatve-folk-rock band called M.Cotu. Since this is the age of film photography, a picture of Daniel and I together wasn’t taken until January ’97 (I’ll post it in the 1997 entry.)

Another highlight from that fall was the night I went to my first real rock show, and at the same time I met one of my heros. (who remains someone I admire to this day.) My brother Jon and his housemates drove down from Hope College, Michigan to pick me up and go to Taylor University – near me, to see the fall tour of the 77s. The “Sevens” were a band Jon introduced to me two years prior. It’s easy to say, for me, there was a before the 77s and after the 77s. Even from the cassette tapes, a whole new vocabulary of life, emotions, and spirituality took up residence in my imagination. I was a quick study of the 7s and their albums; their friend’s bands and their albums, etc. When they took the stage after Love Coma (who I also loved dearly! but had just discovered), I was dancing and jumping and cheering so much that it might have been an emarassament to Jon’s friend James. “Settle down,” he said, “they’re only human.” But I was in ecstacy and danced like a maniac the whole 2 hours they played.

photo credit – a fellow 77s fan at the Taylor University show. (L-R Kneeling: Jon Adamson, Dan Foster. Standing: Me, Mike Roe-front man for the 77s, unnamed friend of my brother, and James Van) Since the film developed, I always thought Mike Roe’s face has a “Mona Lisa” quality here. My first reaction was, “that’s not the best picture of Mike.” But the more I look, I see many paradoxes. Age/youth. Wearyness/Pride. Sadness/Hope.

My music classes, viola lessons, and long night jamming with Daniel and other guitar-playing guys in my dorm, by the year’s close, brought meteoric growth to my musicianship. I started to become friends with so many people who’d become important to me. Looking back, I see I was laying the foundation for the music I’d come to make in the many years ahead.

photo credit – Jon Adamson. Dec 1996