Music has provided me with meaning and a source of joyful purpose. The road to my current happy life wasn’t always straight. I agree with whoever said, “I may not have gone...

where I intended to go, but I have ended up where I needed to be.”

I’ve been interested in music and performance as long as I can remember. My dad was a great early musical influence. He was a self-taught musician, able to play guitar on a professional level. When I was in second grade, while I was getting ready for bed one night, Dad began playing “Jesus Loves Me” and I astonished him and the whole family by beginning to sing in harmony with the melody line. My parents immediately enrolled me in some musical classes.

Dad was a youth pastor in a large church in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. Mt. Vernon was a small town, but the school had a middle aged, mean, and gifted choir director, named Joleen Nelson, who every year would take the school through the local and regional levels to the state competition. Each year there was fierce competition for a place in that choir. Even though freshmen usually had to pay their dues for a year before being accepted, I nailed down a place my first year. It was a goal of mine to make it to all-state in each of my four years in high school, which would have been notable. However, we moved to San Jose for my senior year, so I finished public education at Lincoln High School. Even though it was a performing arts magnet school, the place was a let-down following my fabulous musical experiences in Iowa. Tryouts for the all-state choir were easy; in fact, I found them too easy. During my audition, I completely flubbed one of the lines of Giuseppe Torelli’s “Tu Lo Sai.” The mistake would never have flown in Iowa, but the California judges just let it slide.

The great part of my new California experience was exposure to musical theater and especially to jazz. I found a powerful musical vocabulary in jazz’s difficult rhythms, harmonies, and improvisations.

MAKING MUSIC FOR PAY AND FOR THE LOVE OF MUSIC

After graduating with the class of 2001, I enrolled at Cupertino’s De Anza Junior College and immediately joined an elite Manhattan Transfer-type traveling sextet group, called Vocal Flight. I sang with them for a couple years, performing our own original arrangements and covering songs like “Ain’t No Sunshine,” plus bluesy pieces like “Muddy Waters” and “Lazy Bones.” We made a CD that won an award from Downbeat Magazine. The height of my adventures with the group came when we spent three weeks touring France. The French regard American musical groups as celebrities. We performed at huge venues, with monster set-ups, and stayed in five-star hotel rooms. They thought Vocal Flight was hot stuff. We didn’t disagree.

While in college, I also hooked up with a business called Children’s Delight that would dress me up as some character, such as Sheriff Woody or Peter Pan, and send me to perform at parties. Sometimes I would go as Prince Charming with a beautiful Cinderella on my arm. Performing for those children was a source of both income and pleasure. I got a call a couple months ago from the company asking me to do a Luke Skywalker event. I would have done it, too, except for a conflict with a previously scheduled concert. Those Children’s Delight gigs were always in well-to-do homes and it was during one of them, at the then-new Shadow Lakes, that I had my first visit to Brentwood — a limited exposure that gave me the impression of Brentwood as a hoity-toity community.

I became involved with church music when I auditioned at a local church — Central Christian —as a trumpet player for a planned Easter presentation. When the director discovered my vocalist background, he offered me the job of managing the vocal parts of the production. Afterwards, it turned into an actual job that paid me a hundred dollars a week; I didn’t know where to spend all the money.

The first time I led the morning service was a terrifying experience, and I led all the songs while playing the piano with my eyes shut. After the worship set ended I opened my eyes to discover that nobody was paying attention to me, but everyone was either huddled around or looking at one of the parishioners who was on the floor experiencing a seizure. I decided at that point to scan the audience in the future so that in the event one of them collapsed I could make a suitable program adjustment, rather than simply to continue singing. I thought I would never lead singing but members of the congregation gave me so many favorable comments that I thought I would give it another try.

The director resigned and I assumed the role of Minister of Music. I was only 19 years old and might have been the world’s youngest music minister in a large church. Many amazingly talented musicians are never able to find a way to turn music into a profession, and here I was, a teenager, with the full-time position of worship minister at a 2,000-member church and taking home what seemed to me to be a princely salary. The missions pastor started an outreach church, called Crossroads, and took me with him to be worship pastor, responsible for all the music and performing arts.

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