I've been singing as long as I can remember, playing guitar since I was eleven or twelve, and songrwiting? I guess that depends on what you call "songwriting," but I suppose I've always been into making music in some way or another, be it on my mom's piano when I was a small fellow or with a guitar as I slowly began to pick it up. I've been making electronic music since I was about fifteen when I got a copy of Cakewalk Express and began making MIDI music with it. It didn't take long before I found that I could plug a Radio Shack mic into my computer and stick it up to my amp, using Windows Sound Recorder to record myself playing along with my MIDI songs, then record myself singing along with the guitar-accompanied track I just made. Throw in software in increasingly more complex and expensive degrees somewhere between 2002 and now (as well as some skill improvements all around, I'd hope), and here we are!

It was a punk show in Portland, OR, in April, 2005, and I went with a good friend from high school, Eli Kaplus, with whom I was just starting an awful punk band of my own. Lebenden Toten and Autistic Youth were the only two bands I remember playing that show, and then there were two more that I don't remember. It was also my first exposure to a pretty decent mosh pit, and it was held in a little record store called Below Zero Records. It was on the verge of closing, and I was rather bummed that it was, as it was my first time being there, and I rather liked the place.

Poor man's stuff! I have the first guitar I ever bought, which is also my favorite, this Encore ripoff of the Stratocaster. It was surprisingly well set up when I got it, and it's especially awesome with the Seymour Duncan Hot Rails humbucker I dropped in the bridge position (more Duncans to come for the middle and neck-position pickups), the D'Addario locking tuners, and other more technical and less interesting customizations. The materials it was made of are dubious at best, but it sounds and plays awesome the way I've set it up.<z>
I also have a Phantom POS from the early-to-mid-eighties (no idea what it's really called, but POS just about sums it up; if you look up a Vixen music video, you'll see the guitarist playing one, and I'm still not sure how I feel about that). It worked okay after I dropped a Duncan Designed Invader in it and made sure to string it with Fender Bullets, as the old-school Floyd Rose III likes to part the high E string from its ball if it's of the ordinary variation. I got it for free, so I wasn't complaining; its distressed, dumpster-diving-prize appearance kind of fit the sort of punk-inspired power metal image I was trying to convey onstage at the time, and I hadn't figured out what was wrong with my Encore yet. And really, it drove my Bugera 6260 (yuck, I know, but it's got Mesa Boogie tubes and it's plugged into a Crate Blue Voodoo 4x12 cabinet!) quite nicely with that hot bridge pickup. Very metal.<z>
I also have a Hohner acoustic with a built-in Shadow P7 active pickup that I never use (the pickup, that is). Got it for $350, and it looks/sounds great for the money.<z>
I record my vocals through a recently-purchased MXL V67 tube condenser microphone, use an Audix i5 for recording guitar, and produce/record music with Cubase 6, Halion Sonic SE and several other VST software synths.

That's kind of a hard question. Michael Jackson, Toto and Phil Collins definitely had an influence on how I thought of music in my childhood (and still do today), but Megadeth was kind of my introduction to heavy metal, which has, by far, made the biggest impression on my musical tastes. I discovered them when I was playing Mortal Kombat 3.2587 Super Ultra Ultimate (for Nintendo 64) with my best friend and listening to the MK: Annihilation soundtrack, which had a kind of lame remix of "Almost Honest," but which got me wanting more Megadeth. When he got me Megadeth's "Cryptic Writings" for my twelfth birthday, it was not what I expected, but I liked it even better. The eclectic mix of sounds, textures, tempos and rhythms on that album set the bar for how I've wanted music to be ever since, and Marty Friedman's shredding inspired me to pick up the guitar and try again at it. And that time I didn't put it down.

I'm not in a band right now, although I'll gladly do session work and ghost-writing for other musicians. /shameless self-promotion. Anyway. I sang, played guitar and wrote lyrics (as well as collaborated on music writing with guitarist Peter Sylvia) in a Portland power metal band called White Lightning from August, 2005 until their breakup in November, 2009. Peter had been the drummer for that awful punk band in which I was the awful frontman and my high-school friend, Eli Kaplus, was the not-so-awful bass guitarist. The punk band only lasted about three months, but a couple months after said band broke up, Peter called me up and asked if I'd like to play guitar for his and his sister, Jessica's punk/glam band, White Lightning, having heard some of the (slightly) more sensible music from my Captain Thunderpants solo project on MySpace. Jessica had been the singer, but since she moved to Hawaii, I took over on vocals, and as Peter and I got more into prog/power metal bands like Angra, Symphony X and Sonata Arctica, our sound quickly evolved into a power metal sound of its own. Alas, just like all good things come to an end, White Lightning did just that, and here we are. Perhaps once I make my move to Austin next year I'll try and get something going, once again.

Hmm... JS Bach, if he'd be down. He was a brilliant composer and I'm told he came up with a fugue on the fly for a prince one time. With improv skills like that, he'd be awesome to jam with. Otherwise, George Lynch. He seems like a cool guy, and he's definitely a wicked guitarist; I could learn a lot from him.

The biggest was with White Lightning, and it was probably about 250-300 people, up in someone's loft/warehouse/living space right above a parking garage in downtown Portland. It was a great, big hipster party with a slew of avant rock and folk-type bands, but we'd been invited by a friend I'd met at Bongo Fury (a practice space complex in Beaverton in which my band rented a room), and there were gallons of free vodka. It was a huge crowd, and they received us quite well; I'd never thought our music would appeal to hipsters, but I guess I shouldn't be so judgmental, huh? Anyway, the smallest audience we ever had was at our first show, which was horribly promoted by the now-dead promotion company, and horribly flaked out on by all but two of the thirty friends who had said they'd come. The audience was mostly members of Cellador and Last Empire (both of whom played after we did), but we made some good friends and mentors in the latter band, and had a fun time rocking out to the former, who were good sports in spite of the turnout in a place far from home on their headlining tour. The most memorable show I've ever played, though, like the last two, was with White Lightning, but it was at Satyricon, also in Portland, where we played right before Hirax, a well-respected thrash band from the 80's San Francisco scene. The venue was packed with about 200 people or so, and I've never seen such an energetic crowd since. The opening bands got them sufficiently wound up, we got them even more wound up, and it was pandemonium in the best way by the time Hirax hit the stage. It was an awesome show with some awesome people at an awesome venue!

That's really tough, because my mood, the weather and the time of year kind of determine which albums are my favorite. I suppose if I had to choose, I'd go with the mix of Symphony X songs I got off their website when I was eighteen (plus "Fallen" from their "V" album), as Symphony X is up in the top 3 of my favorite bands, and I was just starting to explore their music with that mix when I tried to pick up surfing the summer after my high school graduation. Didn't go so well on Oregon's tame summer coast, but that was a great vacation, all the same. What better music to listen to on a desert island than music that's very happily associated in my mind with the ocean?