Life is a strange mystery. We never know what’s going to happen even when we think we have an idea. It is a huge monster that no one has seen and yet we all believe in it.

I have been writing songs since I can remember. We were so poor that whenever I had a school project, instead of building something, I would just write lyrics about whatever it is we were studying. Two I specifically remember in the first grade were about dinosaurs and colonialism. Not together, of course, which is a shame. Even in middle school, when Eminem was breaking out, I, like most of my fellow sixth graders, believed that we would also be scrawny blonde rappers who were raunchy beyond belief.

All through middle school I asked for a guitar until, finally on Christmas of my freshmen year of high school, my dad got a purple/blue electric Kramer from a friend who owed him a little bit of money, and my mom got my $20 Abilene acoustic guitar from a thrift shop in the middle of Kentucky that had been played so much the fret board was wearing away.

It was on these two instruments that I taught myself how to play guitar.

Later that year, I was in Mrs. Mooneyham’s Recent American History class when she brought out an old suitcase record player. Mrs. Mooneyham was an old hippy who loved the 1960s. My high school is in a rural valley in Tennessee, so she was mocked relentlessly by the good ol’s boys, rednecks, wanna be preps, and idiots. When she brought out the record player, most of the class laughed at the audacity of something so archaic in the shiny world of 2001 CDs.

She played Joan Baez, Carole King, The Mamas and The Papas, Joni Mitchell, and finally she put on the record that changed my life. All around me, the other students were saying what I can only describe as woefully ignorant things about what she was trying to share with us, but the moment I heard the slightly out of tune acoustic of Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind followed by his raggedy imperfect voice, something clicked into place, and I knew that I wanted to make music just like that for the rest of my life.

I went home and played acoustic guitar for four years straight in my bed, a sheetless full size mattress on the floor. I tried learning other people’s songs, but within ten minutes of practicing one, I had already gone back to writing my own stuff. I wrote countless songs in high school. All of them are forgotten and gone except for the old wrinkly pages of disorganized journals.

My electric went into storage in my closet while I stylized my acoustic with twirled string ends. I also started playing at church, first unplugged and unmic’d, then amplified as I progressed and got better. I became utterly obsessed with songwriting and playing guitar.

There are many parts to this story and hopefully I can find a way to unfold them as the years pass. But let this be a window into the genesis of what would become Dream Jurnal. Enjoy this horrifying picture of me having an actual hairline and being in love with my guitar when I was 17.