Before The Fox’s Wedding…
J.D. and Heather Darnell (around age 2)
I was born in the beach town of Corpus Christi, Texas, and most of my earliest childhood memories are on the water. My dad, a shop teacher, built his own boats and taught me to sail at an early age. Perhaps it through sailing that I have always been deeply attuned to transient nature of our world.
Dad also introduced me to another important skill — music. I grew up with the sounds of his fingerstyle guitar and stories from “the old days,” when he was part of a popular western and rock band. Wanting to give me “formal training,” my parents put me in piano lessons at the age of 7, and later voice and oboe lessons. I majored in oboe in college, determined to become an orchestra musician. However, the singular focus on oboe repertoire and the competitiveness of the classical world drove me to take a step back — then to embrace folk and classic country.
For about a decade, Dad and I performed on the docks of the Corpus Christi Marina. We would throw concerts right on my parents’ boat, with Mom cooking up hors d'oeuvres and handing out beers while Dad and I serenaded fellow sailors with acoustic guitar and sweet harmonies. During that time, I developed a real comfort in performing and freedom in my voice, along with fingerstyle guitar techniques unique to my father. It was a beautiful and perfect time in my life.
When Dad got sick, my world was completely shaken for the first time. This beautiful presence began to slip through my fingers. In the hospital, I sang our songs in Dad’s ear every night until there was silence.
It has taken me several years to begin music again. Grief changed me in so many ways, especially how I heard and processed music. For a long time, I wanted to go back to our perfect time and that person I was happy being. But as the character Crow says in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, “You can never put it back together like it was.”
Wanting to process and share my understanding of the world, its heart, its transience, and its illusions, I picked up the electric tenor guitar. Slowly adding a diverse array of vocal and guitar pedals (earning me status as a “Shoegazer”), I began to create new musical worlds through ambient soundscaping, effects, my inherited fingerstyle guitar technique, and both singing and spoken word.
I don’t know what is “good” or not in this world. However, Dad always said the most important thing in music is honesty. And I believe I am honestly sharing myself.
