Some of you may have seen me around the traps as the frontman and guitarist of The Mustard Band – a cover band that played over 450 gigs at pubs and weddings around Brisbane & the Gold Coast from 2008-2014.
That was my foray into being a working musician, but music for me started somewhere around age 6 when I got my first guitar. At that time my older sister was having piano lessons and I’d wait in the wings to get on the piano and learn by ear the tunes I’d hear her practise.
My musical focus was capricious during high-school, where I took to drumming. Being a drummer in school band meant waiting in line with the other 5 drummers for your turn on the kit, but there was always a spare piano, so I’d play along with chords while I waited my turn.
I was brought up in the church which proved to be quite a training ground for music performance and musicianship. I’d play piano every week in the band through my teenage years. I loved performance and gravitated to being involved in theatre, and acted in a number of Qld community theatres.
Theatre took a back seat however after closing the Australian musical “Still Standing” – a story about a rock band. In the wake of that show I formed the Mustard Band, and it’s success left no weekends free.
In more recent years I reflected on myself as a musician and came to realise that having some natural aptitude for music was both a blessing and a curse, in that I never developed much patience for learning what didn’t come to me quickly, and I spread myself thin across all of the instruments that I was interested in. This lead me to a decision to focus on the piano as my instrument, and to be a student of it, in earnest. Instrumental monogamy has allowed me to begin striving for mastery, which I know will keep me busy for a lifetime, and I’m making sure I embrace the ever-increasing value of imperfection along the way. 🙂