What is your musical background?  Are you musically trained?

No, I'm not trained at all.  But I've always loved music.  My parents
liked various kinds of music, so I heard a lot of it growing up.  I heard
church music, classical music, country music, bluegrass.  When the Beatles
released their first album in America, I bought it with my allowance.  Rock
& roll was so exciting to me, so different.  But the older generation saw
it as something evil.  My parents tried to get me to stick with the piano
lessons I was taking as a teenager, but the more I heard rock & roll, the
more I wanted to play guitar; so I quit piano and started learning to play
<guitar> on my own.  I had some cousins who had similar interests, and
before too long we started our own rock & roll band.  We tried to arrange
the songs we heard on records, but none  of us knew much about music, so we
really kinda made up the chords as we went along.

When did you start playing music professionally?

Well, we made money doing it [in] high school, but I didn't really take
it seriously until I was in college.  By that time, I had become a
Christian.  I was earning a degree in film and television production, but
on weekends, I would do concerts.  I had a rock band, a folk group, and
later just started performing solo.  I joined Solid Rock Records with Larry
Norman three years ago, and I've released two albums since then.
(_On Turning To Dust_, AB Records AB 778;
_Appalachian Melody_, Solid Rock Records - SRA 200).

You're involved in Christian rock & roll music.  How did the fusion of
rock and the church come about in America?

Well, in the 1960s, the churches seemed rather dead; much theological
orthodoxy was upheld, but it seemed to be just words and not a way of life.
It seemed like the church's music spoke only to the older people.  It was
boring for the younger people.  Many of the young people really loved God
and wanted to express their love for Him, but not in the traditional way.
So a lot of us started bringing the rock medium and Christian lyrics
together.  I formed a group like that in 1969.  Of course, we were not
accepted immediately by the Church.  It was a bit of the shock for those
who only saw the hymns and classics as being suitable for church.  I guess
a lot of times, the grown-ups were seeing the malignancies that sometimes
occur in the music business--drugs, illicit sex, irresponsible
living--instead of hearing the music.  As Christians, we opposed that
life-style, but we loved the new music.  Then too, new art is always
rejected by those who develop a taste for their own forms of expression
earlier and reinforce their tastes over the years.  So it was hard for a
lot of us in the beginning, but now in my country it is much more
acceptable.  People have seen the good it can do, and that those of us
involved in Christian rock & roll really do love God.

How did the recording of Fingerprint come about?

I was approached by a Swiss Christian company and asked about the
possibility of doing an album for release in Europe.  I have done a bit of
touring in Europe the last two years, and I enjoy European audiences.  They
seems to take listening more seriously than most American audiences.  So I
began putting songs together for this album.  Most of them are at least a
few years old, and most are just songs I wanted to write, regardless of
whether they would ever be on an album.  So I was overjoyed at the
opportunity to put them on an album for my European friends.  I'm excited
about the things going on with Christian music in Switzerland.  I think
they will avoid some of the mistakes we made in America during the Jesus
Movement.  Kir, the Swiss company, and some other groups have great
potential for communicating the gospel while maintaining high artistic
standards.  I'm happy to be involved with them, both in this record and in
the recording production of a Swiss Christian band.

The credits say you played most of the instruments and engineered at the
same time.  How did you go about recording that way?

Well, my wife and I lived at the studio for two weeks.  I had Peter
Johnson come down and play drums first.  Then, I played guitar, running
wires out from the control room to my amplifier in the studio and miking
the amp.  I did the bass next the same way, then the acoustic guitars,
percussion, background vocals, etc.  So the music was just built up piece
by piece.  For vocals I put blankets over the console to deaden the sound;
that was kinda hard because I had had to operate controls while singing.
You can hear the clicks and pops in some places where I was frantically
trying to be two people at once.  So the album really has a homemade feel
to it.  There's even one place where, if you listen carefully, you can hear
Thurston the dog jingling his collar outside the studio.  When I had to do
too many things at once, Janet Sue would provide some extra hands.

I'd like to ask you some questions about some of the songs on this
album.  The first one, "I'm In Chains": what is that about?

This song is an attempt to draw a satirical picture of the philosophy so
often espoused, sometimes unconsciously, by modern Christians in their
attempt to separate spiritually from the rest of human existence.
Activities get labelled as spiritual or non-spiritual, and it seems a
hierarchy comes about concerning which activities are the most spiritual.
Regular life, our humanness, often gets pushed aside.  (After all, Paul
urged us to set our minds on the things Above, didn't he?)  Truly we should
be careful about our lives becoming tangled up in themselves.  But I think
sometimes Christians go too far in "denying the self."  We can lose the
humanness that God created us with.  We can miss a large portion of life if
we aren't careful.

In Eastern philosophy it is of great value to lose the consciousness of
day-to-day existence in favor of "higher truths."  Life becomes merely an
illusion, a shadow of the real.  To be human becomes undesirable;
transcendence is sought after and deemed superior.  But in the end, no one
can live explaining everything about his life away.  C.S. Lewis said, "You
will find that you have explained explanation itself away."  Any system of
thought which allows no value to human thought will destroy its own efforts.

Life for the Christian is not an illusion, nor was it intended to be.  It
is all too real, and we are not to try and escape its reality as the
existentialists have done.  Nor is humanness evil in itself.

Sometimes it seems Christians confuse their human nature with their sinful
nature.  But they are different.  The former we were created with, the
latter we chose.  It does us no good to try and escape our humanness and in
so doing think we are escaping our sin.  Our lives are important, and we
are responsible before God for how we live them.  That's what I'm trying to
say in this song, and much of my other work also reflects that view.  In
fact, the next song, "Nowadays," is a follow up... "I can be myself
nowadays."  I can love God and fix that flat tire at the same time without
having to worry about what I have to do to be spiritual.

Is "One More Time" a song from your personal experience?

 Every song I write is not necessarily from personal experience; however,
this one is.  I wrestled with skepticism both before and after becoming
Christian.  I had a lot of questions, both philosophically and about
specific things in the Bible.  I found it very hard to talk to other
Christians about most of the questions, however.  I was told that to have
questions was not to have faith.  Once again, I was seeing faith separated
from reality and the reasoning process.  I was even told by some Christians
that I couldn't be helped until I put all my questions aside.  But I knew I
couldn't honestly do that.  It seemed to me that if Christianity is the
truth, then surely it must be open to discussion when points of question
come up.  Jesus showed Thomas the wounds and then he believed.  Finally, a
handful of people did help me.  I can't say that all my questions were
given an a-b-c answer, but enough of my doubts were removed so that my
faith involved my reason and not just my heart.  So this song cam out of
that experience.  I'll always feel indebted to the ones who did take the
time to help me.  I have made a bibliography of books that were helpful to
me.  As I meet people in similar doubting situations at concerts I do, I'm
at least able to suggest some reading.  I find many people are afraid to
admit their doubts, and this is really sad; the anguish can be great at
such times.

Do you have any comments on other songs?

Well, let's see.  "Gimme Mine" is obviously a commentary on how society
adopts its values.  I think we have to be careful not to let society
manipulate its values into us.  It's easy to get victimized in that way.
Peer pressure makes it difficult for most people to decide what to do with
their lives, and that's what the song is about, but the implications of
allowing society to tell us what to do with our lives run much deeper.  Who
has the final say, anyway?  That's why the Bible is such an important part
of the Christian faith.

"All the Sleepless Dreamers" is a further exposition of more than mildly
existential society.  "Negative Charge" reminds us that life is not the
candy-coated, simplistic entity that we as Christians so often cajole
ourselves into believing it is.  "Remarks to Mr. McLuhan" (referring to
Marshall McLuhan) is a simple message to the propagator of the philosophy
"the medium is the message," saying "maybe that is not necessarily the
case"--just an outcry, really, from a Global villager.

Why is the album called Fingerprint?

I think it is important for each of us as creatures made in God's image
to leave our individual marks--graffiti if you will.  Whether that's done
in vinyl, ink, words, paints, actions, whatever, each of us bears the
responsibility to be honest about life, and those of us who are Christians,
to be honest about our faith.  Everyone can be creative in our own
perceptions of life, just to express things in a new way.  Trying to avoid
clichés helps life become fresh again, helps us remember what life is about
in the first place.