My debut album, which I released in 2002.  All the songs were written and performed by me.

I had started writing my own music right about the time I turned 16.  I had found a poem of my father's in a box stuffed back in one of our closets, and decided that I wanted to put it to music.  After that, I started writing a lot more.  During that phase of my life, I was really into the LDS music scene, so a lot of my stuff started sounding like Michael McLean or Kenneth Cope's music.

I went on my mission, where I wrote a whole slew of songs, worked on a cruise ship for 7 months, where I wrote even more songs, and eventually, I had put together more than enough to make an album.

After I got back from performing on the cruise ship, I decided that it was time to record.  I had never done anything like this before, so I spent a bunch of my student loan money, sold my plasma (literally) and did some odd jobs to help pay for the studio time.  I used a combination of friends and professional musicians, and rented out the awesome Rosewood Recording Studio in Provo to record.  It was, without a doubt, the most fun I've ever had.  I was a kid in a candy story.  

Looking back on it now, this album isn't that great.  I didn't know what I was doing, and it showed.  I lucked out by having a lot of really great musicians step in and make the final product far better than it would have been otherwise.  Despite that, though, it was a great experience, and I had a blast doing it.

In the summer of 2003, I was working at a theater down in Southern Utah and was contacted by the artistic director of a dinner theater in Tennessee that had come across my resume online.  He ended up hiring me (and subsequently, two of my friends) to some out to Tennessee from Utah after our performances were over.

I had been hired first to write the arrangements of the music for the upcoming Christmas show, then I was to be a performer in the show after the music was completed.  So, for the first month and a half that I was there, I stayed home all day long writing music.  (It was during this phase that I realized that, perhaps, I didn't want to really make my living as a musician.)

After I got done recording, I was sent over to Nashville to record the backing tracks in the studio with some amazing Nashville musicians.  (Some of the best in the world.)  I spent five days in a little studio there, laying down the rhythm tracks, then I left the tracks in the hands of the orchestrator and went back to Sevierville to start rehearsing.

Once the tracks got sent back to me, I got them together and took them into a local studio with a group of singers including a few folks from the cast to record the backing vocals.  

It turned out, however, that after we had put all this work in, about 60% of the work that I had done on these tracks never really got used.  (Some of the best tracks, IMO, didn't get used.)  Since I had the raw tracks, my two friends and I recorded the lead vocals (and some backing vocals) in the spare bedroom of my apartment for all the tracks and gave these away as Christmas presents to about 200 people.  

This is one of my favorite recordings I've ever done.  First of all, I love Christmas music.  Secondly, to have such masterful musicians play or sing music that I had written was a blast.