So, I guess this is where you’ll typically read something along the lines of…”Born and bred in the rusted-out shell of the Scranton, PA area, Phil was raised in a strict, blue collar, Irish-Catholic family. At an early age, an older cousin exposed Yurkon to the music of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The music and message hit him with the force of a freight train barreling through the heartland, and he knew he was meant for more than his working-class upbringing.  Saving up money from his part-time job laying sheet rock, Phil bought an acoustic guitar…and sealed his destiny. Now, with coal dust in his lungs and a message in his heart, he packed whatever he could onto his motorcycle and moved to the city to realize his dream.”

Ahhhhhh, no. Not even close. Although I am from the Scranton area, I’m not Irish, my favorite band as a kid was Def Leppard, I’ve never owned an acoustic guitar, I don’t recall ever touching sheet rock, and if I ever bought a motorcycle my mom would kill me.

In a lot of ways, my path to songwriting is about as far as you can get from the above fictionalization and the prototypical singer-songwriter story. When I started playing guitar at 16, I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to be a songwriter. I wanted to be the next Eric Clapton and Peter Frampton. I wanted to be a gunslinger. My plan was to build up my chops and team with a songwriter where that person wrote the material and I chimed in with lead work. In college, I briefly found myself in that arrangement. It was in this “band” where I kind of accidentally wrote my first song. I loved it…and then it would be another year until I wrote another song. I kept focusing on my guitar work and would occasionally write if I stumbled upon an idea I liked.

In the interim between then and now, I spent a lot of time lost in the woods. I flirted with a bunch of different projects (in chronological order): briefly tried to front an original band; briefly tried to get in a party band; spent about a year and half in a Steely Dan tribute band (and that was a blast); concurrently tried to start an 80’s tribute band with some friends; spent two years in a jazz-pop duo; at three different points in this mix I gave up whatever the flavor of the month was and tried to be a serious jazz guitarist; and then found myself with no direction. Go figure.

In late 2013, all that changed. I finished writing my song “Two Moons.” Prior to writing that song, I was an opportunistic songwriter. If I had a good idea, I would see where it took me. But unfortunately, I heeded the bullshit advice of “don’t force it, man; let it be natural.” No. Once you get that initial five second inspiration, you need to work. Thankfully, I had a self-imposed recording deadline and I needed to work to finish that song. I didn’t have the luxury of “let it be natural.” And guess what? I worked and actually finished a song and was proud of the result. This rekindled my affection for songwriting and it was a Kuhnian Shift. That’s shaped my worldview since then, and I’ve had more fun with music than I’ve ever had since turning to dedicated songwriting.

If there’s one common thread hemming together all my work, it’s I like a good hook and traditional song structure. I’m not afraid to say that - a good melody is a good melody. I never want a casual listener to hear one of my songs and not know definitively on the first listen where the verse ends and the chorus begins. I always thought that was a universal, but I’m kind of amazed at how many people write songs where you can’t tell where the chorus is, or, even worse, there is no chorus and it’s just a series of verses. If that makes them happy, great; that should be the motivation for writing. But that’s not my style. I certainly believe you can get whatever message you want across and do it in an accessible way. I think someone by the name of Don Henley (my songwriting hero) had a pretty successful career doing that.

I sincerely hope you enjoy my music if you choose to listen to it. And if you don’t enjoy it, I at least hope you can feel some sincerity and some kind of talent behind it. Thank you.

2023 UPDATE: Still trying to get that hard rock band together. It’s taking a while, but I believe in the music too much to give up just because shitheads on Craigslist gonna shithead. Still no pop-oriented projects for the time being.