Michael Thomas Smith

Born 3 decades ago in the unpeopled glacial heart of an Illinois winter, vicariously, owing to the love between an Indiana husband and wife, Michael Thomas Smith materialized and manifested immediately at 6 foot 4 inches tall and 220.2 pounds confessing 1981's Top 40, Franz Liszt, and Joseph Haydn. Winter was a new era. Fruition was daily as Michael's brother and sister tended his side while their mother and father tilled the soil and simmered the hasenpfeffer stew. New politics entered the world with goals of peace through strength while the reverse rang more logically sound for the giant budding tot. Proprietors of a bijou grass farm, the Smith family lived on premises off the land. Tending to it weekly by no choice of their own, the children learnedly became home schooled amateur horticulturalists.

A Sony TPS-L2 Walkman™ cassette player first introduced Michael to a Beach Boys mix tape on which his brother personally hand-picked the cuts, unknown by the greenhorn green thumb, were lawn-mowing favorites of his elder hermano. Somewhere along this bearing came Michael's first personal lawn-mowing allowance cassette purchase, Rush: Fly By Night, purely because the album cover boasted an azure owl. Good instinct. Great inclination. An intrinsic, idiosyncratic anomaly began to coerce the boy to create, from the thinnest of air, his own good vibrations.

His siblings' record collections began to fill the melting pot. An ever expanding recursive spherical knowledge base of musical knowhow. UB40, Big Mountain, Jodeci, Wham, Fine Young Cannibals, P.M. Dawn, Genesis, Faith No More, The Cure, Motley Crue, Warrant, Primus, Michael Jackson, A Tribe Called Quest, Soundgarden, 311, Freddy Jones Band, Guns n' Roses, Huey Lewis and the News, Boyz II Men, Metallica, and The Beatles.

A clarinet opened the door to something left to be unseen by even a powerhouse of imagination. There will always be an ache to be remedied or a despondency to be steamrolled. Crusading an engagement with peace of mind and gnarly guitars is where you could be under compulsion to find him. That, or somewhere between now, all things considered, and then.