The Sheep Fiends are simply the best group of musicians that I know. I feel truly blessed to have the ongoing opportunity to make so much music with this entertaining bunch. I would describe The Sheep Fiends as an recalibration of a more immediate social approach to music. The Sheep Fiends, like Jackson Pollock or Neil Cassidy, bring a sense of the immediate, transient and spontaneous subconscious into a modern musical form.

Considering The Sheep Fiends improvisational approach to composition, one might expect the resulting music to degenerate constantly into chaos, going nowhere, destination zero. Yet it contiues to delight me when a great song manifests from the nowhere aether. We almost never agree on a key, discuss composition or rehearse our songs. We have never had much desire to play a song more than once. If anything, this is our hook.

The Sheep Fiends project began just a few years before the internet, let alone YouTube, became a thing. We live amongst the first generations where the recording of music has even been possible and I appreciate having been amongst the first to be able to explore the freedoms provided as technology makes it easier to inexpensively record and share music.

As many musicians have been involved with The Sheep Fiends over three decades, there are always a wide variety of influences and genres to explore, though I notice increasing gravitation towards more progressive rock sounds. The Sheep Fiends Fiends explore a wide range of emotion, both light and dark. Music often being the cathartic expressions that often reflect immediate things, passions, dreams, joys, hopes, fears, worries or despair.

I do not find it surprising that a band like The Sheep Fiends came from Chicago. Chicago has a rich history of improvisation across jazz, blues, live comedy like Second City, and improvisational theatre such as you might find done by The Neo-Futurists. Influences of note include: Black Sabbath, Can, Miles Davis, The Flaming Lips, Genesis P-Orridge, The Grateful Dead, Hawkwind, Jim O'Rourke, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, The Orb, Phish, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, The Velvet Underground, Wilco, Neil Young and Frank Zappa.

The photo of me on this page was taken "On Stage" at the EMP Museum in Seattle - kind of like playing Guitar Hero on steroids. This is not a photo of me playing with the Fiends, but it is fun.

Enjoy, and remember, feedback is your friend.