About Rick...

I come by my musical influences honestly—and from very different places. My father was from Vienna and loved opera; I didn’t. My mother was the daughter of a Saskatchewan wheat farmer. She wasn’t particularly musical herself, but her two brothers were devoted fans of country and western music.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my two sets of cousins and uncles in the summers and all the Bakersfield era and current country music would be playing through the house or campsite from car radios.

Back then, there were a lot of black and white western movies on TV. I really liked Roy Rogers movies.  He was a singing cowboy who could shoot you with his guitar.

 Country and Western music shows were often on too. Several times, I remember seeing shows of the current country music stars playing in a circle or a seated line, all with their glittering rhinestone suits and guitars.  I think, deep down I longed to be one of those guys. 

By my teenage years, rock music was in.  I wrote my first song when I was 47.  From teen hood to then, my involvement with music was little more than singing with the car radio.

As a young man I ventured to the mountains of Alberta and stayed in and around Canmore for ten years living and working in the wilderness reserve there.  My time there shaped much of who I am now.

When I came back to my home area, one thing lead to another and I became an assistant bailiff.  Within 3 years I was appointed as a bailiff.

Where I’m from, Ontario, Canada, a bailiff is that person appointed by the Provincial government to be in a community to have creditors come to have their self-help remedies executed.  That means stuff like car or equipment repossessions and other types of seizures for commercial landlords or governmental bodies.  You see a lot of life plying that trade.

Along the way, I married.  It was not a good marriage and eventually we divorced. Honestly, it was a gut wrenching three years of divorce proceedings particularly because we had a daughter I wanted to have stay in my life. Many bad things happened during that time.

Throughout, I was under tremendous stress and did a lot of walking in the evenings to burn it off.  One day, I was walking and got a pebble stuck in the sole of my shoe.

As I walked with the pebble, it made a rhythmic sound like a click track. Some words to a song started coming to me and by the end of my walk I had half a song which I finished that evening.  I thought, “hmm” that’s pretty good and soon after, I made up another then another.

Being a bailiff involves a lot of driving.  I guess out of some cathartic reason, instead of listening to the car radio I would make up songs while driving to my destinations.  Of course, no instrument…just in my head.

I couldn’t really say the early songs where this genre or that but as I began working with musicians to make them into music and to write further songs, the influence of the music I loved as a kid came to shape them more and more.

Even now, I don’t know if my songs would fit neatly into a genre category.  The best I can say is that I’m a county guy making music but not necessarily a guy making country music.

 I’m up to around 230 songs under my belt now.  Those are the ones that stuck.  They are all, I think, well crafted. Some are funny.  Some are sad. Some are fast and some are slow. All of them are from my fundamental outlook on life…shrug your shoulders, look hard straight ahead and go forward.