Joe's Biography

I remember buying my first 45 record as a child.  Actually, my mother bought it for me.  It was “She Loves You” by the Beatles on the Swan record label.  I used to stand in front of the mirror with a plastic wiffle ball bat as my guitar and lip sync to it.  Some years later, I remember dragging my tiny amplifier and my electric guitar out onto the terrace above our garage and doing a solo “roof top” concert for the neighborhood. 

Ever since those early days my guitar has always been an extension of me. And it has been my refuge during troubling times.  I started writing songs as a child and finally reached the point where I liked my songs as much as the songs of my favorite recording artists.  From that point on I began introducing my original songs when I performed solo around Albuquerque.  It was a thrill when people I didn’t even know responded positively to them.

During the 80s and 90s, before the children came along, I would play in cafés and coffee houses, relying heavily on well loved cover tunes, but reaching into my bag of originals more frequently as time went by.  Playing solo was always somewhat of a personal challenge for me, having relied on fellow band members in my earlier days to help give me the confidence I needed to perform live.  In the end it became my preferred style of performing and sharing my own compositions became a way of exposing myself even further.

My musical influences range from the Beatles, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Greg Brown, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Bruce Springsteen, Crosby, Stills and Nash…I can go on.  But my main focus has always been on the singer/songwriters who can tell an engaging story, or paint pictures with words in 3 minutes and 30 seconds, while interweaving an equally lucid and shimmering melody.  

When the two come together in a song, something magical enters the world and remains in people’s psyches, often becoming an emotionally filled memory of certain times in their lives.