I was born and raised in Antioch. My parents were originally fans of Classic Rock, but as I began to take control of my repertoire, I veered them towards country and to pop divas...

like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Shania Twain. As a child, I would do more than put on mini concerts; I would do complete performances, dancing, singing, and creating extemporaneous music videos. When my parents finally realized how serious I was about singing and performance they began to enter me in various competitions, talent shows, private parties, and weddings.

Starting Into Music

My first big major gig was as a 13 year-old singing the National Anthem at the AT&T Stadium before a Giants ball game. I had some performance anxiety, of course, but was especially terrified by the challenge of walking to the mic across the turf in my high-heel shoes without taking a header and landing on my face. Fortunately, I made it to the mic stand without incident and then made the happy discovery that singing before all those fans was easier than I had imagined it would be. I’ve learned that the larger the crowd the easier the performance. You can’t see any reactions in a large crowd; those thousands of faces are just blobs. As a result, having 70,000 people watching you perform without seeing any of their reactions is easier than singing before 70 people, when you are aware of individual responses. Also, singing before that multitude was exciting!

In the earliest days of my public performances, I would bring a karaoke machine along with me to the various gigs. I eventually realized that live musicians would be better than my karaoke machine, and that my music would be more marketable and compelling if I could perform with a band, so in my junior year in high school I enlisted some professional musicians to join my band. Five of us started practicing together. The guys were onboard with the project just because of their willingness to help me build my experience, getting me more performances, and building my fan base. We began doing concerts in East County, and soon spread to the Sacramento Area, and then to the City. Before long, we were playing throughout Northern California.

We started in the wintertime so our first gigs were in local bars and restaurants. As summer approached, we were gaining experience and our reputation was growing, so we began performing at fairs and festivals with appearances at Brentwood’s Corn Fest, the Streets of Brentwood, and at the Alameda County Fair. We began promoting ourselves and landing higher paying venues.

When I get opportunities to perform at places that are too small to support the band, I go with my acoustic guitarist, Bill Sheridan, and the two of us perform our shows unplugged. These provide me with ideal opportunities to try out new materials. The attendees at these smaller events are up-closeand- personal, laid back, and prepared to learn who I am as an artist. They enjoy listening to original songs. This provides a nice counterpoint to my performances at bars, clubs, and festivals where most people want to hear the songs they know.

In elementary and middle school I began writing poems and stories, but had no idea of how to convert them to song lyrics and didn’t begin to write my own songs until I was 16 years old. My manager steered me to the Nashville Song Writing Association (NSAI). I took some workshops with them and later participated in an educational organization called the West Coast Songwriters at which point I began learning about the craft of songwriting and started to set my stories and poems into music. As I started to develop my song-writing skills, melodies would just seem to pop into my head, and I would capture them on my computer or phone.

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