A renaissance man, and a true desire to achieve the highest artistic quality inspired me to begin my musical career by laying a foundation to grow from.
My musical knowledge came the old fashioned way. I studied. Before my studies I drew my talent as a strategic planner from my successful business career to layout a path to produce a very fine quality musical product.
It was clear to me from the beginning that I would need to be competent in at least 4 areas of the music business to build a rewarding and profitable career/business. The first order of business was to learn how to write music, so I studied music theory with a college professor that was also an accomplished pianist, and woodwind artist playing with two symphony orchestras and a jazz ensemble.
The next building block was to study and have vocal lessons so I would be able to sing my originals, and record demos to send to established artists. My theory professor recommended a very highly recognized voice teacher. So, I progressed at a steady pace, and still was able to keep composing my own original music.
The next step was to start producing demos with my originals to forward them to accomplished artists within their range/style. I produced a few demos, and it was evident that producing came quite easy for me. I quickly accumulated a catalog of my original tunes.
In the early and mid 80’s, music videos began to appear on MTV, VH1, and on CMT. I made a good connection in Nashville with the producer of “Video Country” and talked him into running two of my full-blown master quality music videos I produced using two of my songs with full orchestral arrangements. The ballad received 500 pieces of positive response when it ran in the new artist segment of Video Country. The response was 90% female. I definitely made a note of that, and it always tends to target the ladies in my song selection and marketing. It was evident that my music would never fit in the country genre because my music is “more Pop, more AC, and more into Jazz”.
Now, I also learned that I needed to study lyric writing. While in Nashville I met Jon Ims a hit songwriter who gave private lessons, and also Grammy winning songwriter and author Sheila Davis who gave private lessons.
I learned a lot about writing lyrics from them.
When I decided to dismiss the idea of being signed by a major label and instead opened my own indie label “Lone Eagle Records” my first release was “Cool Smooth & Sassy”.
It spotlighted a tenor sax session with, Joe Genovesi.
Tom put 14 of his ballads on his first release, and pressed 1,000 copies and sold 500 the first six months, and to date has sold 1,200+ CD’s, and is still selling CD’s, and downloads on
www.cdbaby.com.
I have produced and released Fifteen (15) CD’s on the Lone Eagle label (mine), and sold and marketed primarily through “CDBaby”, and their digital partners.
In 2009, I was doing a radio show out of Kansas City, and was asked to write and sing an arrangement of “America The Beautiful” for a special Memorial Day Show. A female restaurant owner had heard me, and called and asked if I would do a live show for a Ladies Night Out at her restaurant in KC. After doing said show I made the decision to move from Producer to Performer, and start the Fourth phase of my musical career. I began performing every chance I got. An upscale lounge style act featuring a many Sinatra, classic love songs, and my originals is extremely well received by all female age ranges.
I also had the honor of singing my arrangement of America at the last Memorial Day ball-game ever at Rosenblatt Stadium home of the College World Series in 2010. I met Chuck Pennington the keyboardist of Manheim Steam Roller fame and enlisted him to play for me on America. I believe this opened the door for me, and Chuck to work on six more songs together four, which are on my latest release “Love Passionately”.
