After my mother and I escaped Castro's revolution in Cuba, I grew up in Miami, Florida. In my childhood, I was drawn to science and oceanography, but in my teenage years, literature, film, and music became my passions. After high school, I moved to New York City to pursue a career in music, first at the Manhattan School and then at Juilliard. After graduating, I spent my youth knocking about New York and New Jersey playing and writing music anywhere I could get a job, from bars to churches, schools, and community theatres, basement bands, wedding bands, and working bands. I wanted to know music not as it existed in school, safe behind the fortress walls of academia, but as it lived and breathed in the real world.

One of my biggest sources of inspiration is nature. I like to be close to woods, mountains, or oceans, and visit them regularly to remind myself that despite all our worries and expectations, there is something far bigger and far more important than our petty little short-term existences. I like to live in a place where I can look up at night and see stars on a clear night and not what I saw for most of my life - the electric neon haze of a city.

I write many different kinds of words and music, believing, like the composer Hindemith, that art has different roles in the world and that all are all valid. I've written pop songs for radio, theme IDs for television stations, music for film and cartoons, and music for theatre. I've written words as a music critic, as a poet, and as a writer of fiction. I've also written music and words that don't fit any existing niche or category and are there only because I felt they needed to be.

Unfortunately, it seems more and more that the role of art in our digitized world is to serve as background, as wallpaper. The skills of reading and listening are gradually being lost. People seem ever-more concerned with expressing themselves, ignoring others, or simply tuning out. This is a sad state of affairs and one that makes what I do sometimes feel tragically doomed, outdated. I can only hope that this is a passing trend and not a paradigm for the future. I hope we don't become a world of drones that are touched only by commercially induced emotions and not by the interconnected exchanges that have characterized most of human history.

If we lose our passion, our love of life and art and our need for each other, we'll have nothing.

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