I was born in ’72 in Providence, Rhode Island, to a single Mother in the early stages of substance recovery. Like many in Generation X, I spent a lot of my childhood fending for myself. Stability was rare, and exposure to music and art the only real constant. Whether attending weekly gatherings at The Temple of Music in Roger Williams Park, or being snuck into tiny cafés to see underground artists like Paul Geremia and Tracy Nelson, or even seeing Dylan on the Street Legal tour, my early memories of live music – of people drawn together by something larger than themselves, a mystery – left a deep impression on my mind and soul. 

Moving to rural Maine in the early 80’s I picked up my first instruments: violin and clarinet. I found solace in practice, tuning out the chaos of our lives, the ex-husbands, new boyfriends, and stepfathers serially holding out the promise of a solid foundation that never seemed to materialize. One of these attempts relocated us to Vermont, and in the seventh grade I broke my leg skiing. Given a guitar for my convalescence, I picked up the chords quick, and became obsessed with my Mother’s record collection, where I found Hendrix, Aretha, The Kinks, BB King, and The Band, along with newer artists like Los Lobos and Treat Her Right. 

I got my first job the next summer, washing dishes at the inn where my mother was a waitress. I saved up my pay and bought a Fender Squire Bullet, a Peavy Backstage Plus, and a Cry Baby Wah-Wah pedal. A neighborhood kid taught me some AC/DC stuff and the riff from Johnny B. Goode, and I joined a punk rock band. I hated high school in the best American tradition, passing tests and turning in just enough work to get by, while reading on my own and living for music. Then, somehow, a bass arrived in my life and I gravitated to it like nothing I’d played before. I felt a profound sense of responsibility, driving the harmony and rhythm in a band, and that responsibility resonated deeply. I never looked back. 

I enrolled at Berklee College of Music at twenty and learned enough to start working. Within a few years I’d toured most of the Eastern seaboard in a van, sleeping on couches and sampling the winning admixture of Lysol, smoke, stale beer, piss, and vomit that says, rock club. I did some drugs, I quit some drugs. I swung a hammer between gigs, and even ran a restaurant for a while. In my thirties I joined the band of a major label artist, played on TV, toured the world by plane and bus. Since then I’ve played bass, on the road and on records, with artists as diverse as Booker T, Twinemen, Jeffrey Foucault, and Chris Smither, and fronted my own band, Thank God For Science.

In 2005 I cut a record of my own songs under my own name with the late great Billy Conway (Treat Her Right, Morphine) producing. I toured it here and there, but I was too busy working as a sideman and with other projects to give it much attention. In the spring of 2022 I found myself with a pile of songs and I asked Kris Delmhorst – an old friend and tour companion, and a musician I admire – to help shepherd them into the world. Observations, reflections, opinions, and love letters to the times I’ve traveled through and the people I’ve loved, Midlife Chrysler drills down through two and a half decades on the road, the tension between here and gone, love and motion, music and silence, work and calling in a country where the exceptions make all the rules, and where everything feels like a racket, except music. The big mystery, the one that still brings people together.