Two Songwriters

Both Julie and Chris were innately drawn to music from early in their lives. When he was seven and other kids were bringing Matchbox cars to school for show and tell, Chris brought Paul McCartney and Wings albums, much to the perplexity of his peers. Julie, riding in the car at the age of four, overheard a commercial on the radio and boldly professed to her mother "Oh, I could do better than that!" Her mother challenged her to do so and Julie improvised a jingle that her family still remembers and sings to this day. Their partnership that began in 1997 almost didn't happen. Chris was a regular member of a songwriting group in Westfield, NJ, an hour from home, but after a few years the distance finally caused him to scale back his attendance, missing the particular week when Julie first showed up. It was also a bit far for Julie and she was reluctant to come back again but the group’s director, Sue Witzel, convinced her to give it one more try and then gave Chris a call. "There was a writer you missed today" Chris remembers Sue telling him, "You have to come back next week to meet her. You guys would be perfect." They met and tentatively decided to give collaborating a shot. Chris had an instrumental piano piece he'd been working on for years but just couldn't find the right person to finish it, so he offered it to Julie. It only took her two days to come up with a melody and lyrics that were exactly what Chris had been searching for. They immediately recognized a rare musical connection and started writing and performing together relentlessly. Their story then grew deeper when a few years later Chris married Julie's sister and they became family, and both began raising children. Over many years they performed as an acoustic duo and in various incarnations of bands from New York's Bitter End, to New Jersey's PNC Arts Center, to Nashville's Broken Spoke. They've also had moderate success with film and TV placements, won a number of songwriting awards, and later tried their hand at publishing. But after investing years and countless hours into performing, building a following, and developing a small publishing company, they realized they had spread themselves thin and neglected their greatest passion, songwriting. This, they decided, needed to be their focus. Though their lives have changed immeasurably since they met, what has remained constant for each is their deep and relentless passion for music, very much unchanged from how they felt as kids. This website showcases a portion of their work together from the last fifteen years.