A bit of background--I was born in 1964, in Arlington, Virginia.  I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, in the close-in DC suburbs.  The first album I bought was Station To Station, by David Bowie.  It's the album with Golden Years as the single.  It's Bowie in his Thin White Duke phase, and it's a really good album.  The title track still has my favorite guitar solo of all time.  Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Graham Parker, and Tom Petty were the musicians that blew my head off.  They are the reason I became a musician.  To my young mind, everything at that point in the 70's was denim, big hair, guys with lots of facial hair, and overly cheesy, drawn out songs.  It seemed that every guy was trying to prove how sensitive he was, in a really schmaltzy way, (think David Soul, winged hair, and vans- everybody had their custom van).  And then I heard My Aim Is True.  Elvis Costello's first album.  My sister, Sheila, had bought it, and I had mocked it at first.  The songs were too short, I thought.  I was looking at the jacket. It was the usual sibling taunting.  But when she played it over and over, it really kicked my ass.  We came to it late-- within a month or so, his second album, This Year's Model, came out, and when I heard Graham Parker sing "So all of you be damned, we can't have heaven crammed, so Winston Churchill said,  I could have smacked his head" on the song Protection, from his album Squeezing out sparks, I was IN.  Those records were kind of my Ed Sullivan moment, in the way that you hear older musicians say that when they saw The Beatles, or Elvis Presley, MUSIC MATTERED. This was also just about the time that my friend Greg Ruff and I had gone from making "comedic" bits on a tape recorder to trying to make funny songs, to making real songs.