I was very fortunate to have a parent that loved all styles of music. My father spent evenings and weekends singing along with the jams on the family stereo, digging rock & roll, country, pop, and blues tunes. I grew up listening to a little of everything.
After singing on stage for the first time at the ripe old age of nine, I knew that music would always be a part of my life. The female vocalists I admired most were soulful women who could wail, like Bette Midler and Patsy Cline. They taught me, as I learned to sing myself, that I should try to put emotion and clarity into every song I sang. These wonderful artists always convey the truth in what they sing, and that emotion and depth comes across every single time. I work for those same qualities in my own music.
When it came time to settle down, I married a Navy man. As we travelled to far off places like Florida and Guam on assignment, I continued to look for venues where I could sing. Over the years, I performed in dinner theaters, open air festivals and at dozens of rodeos. I picked up the mike at country fairs--when it's only been me and the animals putting on the show--and enjoyed the rare opportunity of opening for a number of major country acts. If anyone was willing to listen, I was more than willing to sing.
We were stationed in Florida when I first met JP Goggin. He was a Naval Officer and pilot like my husband. He was also a talented musician looking for a vocalist to collaborate on original material. When we first got together and started working on our own songs, a whole new world opened up for me. JP would play something and I'd say "Oh, I have lyrics that will work with that." We wrote three or four songs that first week. The songs developed and we took them out to a few local clubs and holes-in-the-wall. No matter where we played, we always got a huge response.
Unfortunately, it wasn't long before my husband and I left Florida to return to Washington State, where we grew up. JP and I continued to write long distance for a year or so, but the Navy soon tranferred him overseas and we lost track of each other.
Despite this turn of events, I went on performing as I always had. We moved to Las Vegas for a while and I did the scene there, working with a few cover bands. We moved back to Washington after a couple of years, and I went back to singing at open mic's and sitting in with a group here and there, doing weddings and rodeos and that kind of thing. It felt good to be singing in front of people, but no one wanted to spend time working on original songs like the ones JP and I had written.
Then almost four years ago, when my husband and I were moving to Hawaii, a friend of mine tracked JP down. He was living in Austin, Texas. JP and I started talking about meeting up again and seeing what we could do with the songs we had written. It took close to a year to coordinate time for us to get together, but when we did, we soon realized that the old magic was still there. I flew back and forth between Austin and Oahu almost every other month in order to write and record "Crossroad." We redid some of the old tunes and wrote a few new ones. It felt good to be making our own music again.
Crossroad is a first effort, a short sketch of the long list of songs we've put together over the last couple of years. The style of music on this album is a blend of our musical backgrounds and styles--everything from rock to R&B to country to Spanish flamenco. The lines between genres are so thin anymore, putting a song like "Far Away" on the same CD with "No Man Should Ever Do" doesn't seem as outside the box as it used to be. And getting together has yielded a treasure trove of new song ideas and new twists on old tunes too. We have so much material, we're already working on a second CD, due out in the first part of 2007
I've learned much throughout this process and have really enjoyed recording and releasing this CD. As the old saw goes, I hope you enjoy listening to "Crossroad" as much as I enjoyed singing it.
Love,
Alison
September 2005, updated November 2006
