Anybody remember the Book-It program at Pizza Hut?  Grade school kids read a certain number of books or pages a month and get a free little pizza?

Yeah, I crushed that.

Reading has always been a delight for me.  I love falling into a story and losing yourself there.  I love the way a great character in a foreign situation can help you understand yourself a little better.  And I love the way great writers can so quickly describe a setting, an emotion, the tone of a conversation.

Writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck, C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton were and are favorites of mine.  I so admire they way they tell stories so intimately human and intimately divine.  They're not always the happiest stories, but neither are the stories of our own lives.  And it shines so bright whenever redemption happens.

Music grabbed me early on, as well.  I was raised on big band and old school CCM, but really fell in love with music in the early 90's, when I had a paper route that let me listen to the radio.  I heard U2, Peter Gabriel, Pearl Jam, Toad the Wet Sprocket...  That changed my life.  You could hear such emotion in their songs.  And they were so catchy and sonically interesting.  I just fell in love.  

Later I had similar experiences with the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon (my all-time favorite songwriter).

But listening to music and writing your own is a very different thing.

I started writing songs as soon as I knew three chords on the guitar.  This was probably my sophomore year of high school.  The first songs were terrible, as first songs are supposed to be, but I soaked up everything I could listen to and started trying to do things like the writers I liked.

Junior year, we watched the U2 "Zoo TV" laserdisc at a friend's house, and I was amazed when they went to the little B stage in the middle of the crowd, Bono put on an acoustic guitar, played E, F# and A and sang "Stay".  The crowd erupted.  They sang along.  It was an incredibly powerful moment.  

And you know what??  I knew those chords!!  I knew those words!!  I could do that!!  It looked so easy...