Mike grew up in Marietta Georgia listening to all the “Classic Rock n Roll” bands of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. He got a guitar and big amp, and learned how to play along with the records. The influences never faded. After graduating from Georgia Tech and beginning an engineering career in Charleston, South Carolina, Mike found a purpose for his musical gifts in an adult church retreat ministry where contemporary Christian songs were played on acoustic guitars and everyone sang together in large group environments. Mike says “I polished up my old Gibson Hummingbird guitar and put on new strings and was soon leading “praise and worship” music in numerous groups weekly from large to small, for teens, college groups, and adults.”

The many teen friends that Mike mentored through his teen ministry introduced him to a new form of pop music with faith-based lyrics, and he began writing similar songs with rock and roll arrangements. Leading adult and teen retreats made him a better story-teller and that made me a better lyricist. Mike discovered that storytelling through great songs is a fantastic mind game exercising different parts of the brain than his profession, engineering, and it became his passion.

The acclaim of his song “United Through It All”, a pro-America song written on and about 9/11/01 (see the story elsewhere on this website), ignited a desire to write a hit song. Thin threads connected him to some of Nashville’s top songwriters and publishers at an annual gathering in Hopetown, Abaco, Bahamas, and many became good friends. Watching their success at providing hit songs to the record industry inspired him even more, and he began writing Country/Americana style songs.

Mike has composed over 150 original songs, and recorded over 60 highly-produced catalog masters in a professional studio with a former RCA Records producer and “name-brand” session musicians from Nashville, Atlanta, New York, Muscle Shoals, and Charleston. “I never could have imagined creating a body of work like this, and having the opportunity to work with such high caliber professionals to turn songs into great records”.