Meet Mike
Music for sinners, lovers, and beautiful mistakes
Some of the biggest turns in life don’t look like mistakes until you’ve lived long enough to recognize them.
One of mine was quitting the piano.
My parents signed me up for lessons in elementary school, and I loved the idea of making music. What I didn’t love was practicing — the endless scales, drills, and rules that kept me inside while the world was calling me out to run, play, and feel alive. By seventh grade, the piano was gone from my life. A guitar followed me into college, but without lessons or guidance, it gathered dust and quietly disappeared too.
Decades passed.
In my late forties, while Christmas shopping at a Barnes & Noble, I noticed a small display: Learn to Play the Harmonica. On a whim, I bought it. I tore open the package in the car, slid the CD into the player, and before I reached home, I was already playing songs. Something woke up in me that had been asleep for a very long time.
For the next several years, I played nearly every day — in my car on the way to court, with friends, at jam sessions with ski patrollers, and at open mics where I learned the art of putting myself out there. I wasn’t perfect. But I was joyful. I joined a band, learned a wider songbook, and found my voice — literally — as I began to sing.
Someone once told me that if I wanted to become a better harmonica player, I should learn the bass guitar. So I did. My wife gave me a bass for my birthday, and I dove in headfirst, taking classes, playing constantly, and discovering the deep pleasure of being part of the heartbeat of a song. The bass gave me something the harmonica couldn’t — a place to sing, to groove, and to truly live inside the music.
Then I moved to Santa Fe — and something else unexpected happened.
I realized I could write songs.
For forty years, I was a trial lawyer. I told stories for a living — my clients’ stories, their heartbreaks, their regrets, their hopes. Now I tell my own. I write about love and loss, broken cowboys and beautiful strangers, desire, regret, cats, aliens, and the strange, tender corners of the human condition.
My songs are desert-born and soul-driven — honest, a little dangerous, and deeply human.
The truth is simple: playing music makes me happy, and it makes other people feel good. While I always strive to play well, what matters most is playing with joy.
I may have found this path later in life, but music has become one of my life’s great passions — a place of freedom, creativity, connection, and pure pleasure.
These are my songs.
They are music for sinners, lovers, and beautiful mistakes