Michael John Serpe, born second son to Arnold & Lucille, for faith in the family name....

By the late 1970's, finding construction work in New York was work in its' self & the search had taken my pop, with his cement boots & trowel, to various states & even countries. He was in Iran for a bit, got out right before the hostage crisis, lucky for them I say. Back then my pop was all piss & vinegar, I'm talking plenty of attitude & I'm sure too much even for a bunch of irate Iranians to deal with.

Sometime after that his search for work took him to Arizona & the wild west; "Wild my ass" he said, it was 1979 & the only thing in Arizona was orange orchards, convenience stores & plenty of dirt fields for the devils developers to turn into soulless strip malls, But oh hell oh well, work is work when you have a family to feed so he loaded me, my brother, my mother & our dog schultz up into the "Blue Goose", a baby blue Chevy station wagon fully equipped with an am stereo, a CB (which turned out to be more entertainment then the stereo) & a navigational lamp situated over the passenger seat for easy night time map planning. He cursed his last New York winter & drove us towards an endless Arizona summer.

My mother, "cookie", a name that followed her out of the cookie jar she always had her hand in as a kid & replaced her birth name of Lucille, was what every full blooded Italian man could want for in a wife. She was a beautiful girl, 100% Italian herself & easy with the traditional notion of the times that one goes to school, graduates with their reputation intact, marries & has children. That, along with other traditional notions wore thin & broke over the years, not just for my mom, but for all of us.. & though the family split & scattered, she has always stood solid in the fortitude that is only a mothers love & shines as steady, subtle & bright as the porch light left on to beckon us home.

As for music, it has always been in my life, growing up, I liked all sorts of stuff, though I pretty much gravitated towards the rock & roll. By the time I was 16 years old, my then over bearing presence & the fact that I owned a car, landed me a spot singing for a punk rock band whos members were in desperate need of a yelling ass & more importantly someone to drive their gear around. I quit yelling & started playing guitar in 1991 in various rock bands while in college studying design. I quit college & followed a now long time ago ex-girlfriend to Seattle where I worked in various screen printing shops as well as some night clubs. I also interned at both C/Z records & SUB POP records which led me in 1994 to start HOME RECORDED CULTURE , a "tool box" & safe house for singer/ songwriters who have traveled the roads of traditional folk/ Americana & it' s hybrid off- shoots. Fully equipped with a bare-bones recording studio & a screen print shop, we record & custom package the work of artist at a pace & to the degree that is natural to them.

Through this I've had the honor of releasing a split 7" with Doug Martsch of Built To Spill & a compilation featuring members of Black Heart Procession, Dead Kennedy's, Love As Laughter, Tattle Tale & Lungfish. The handcrafted packaging of these two releases got the attention of SUB POP which led me to the opportunity of designing & packaging a limited edition 7" for Sunny Day Real Estate. Though these honors have been the most noteworthy, I wouldn't say it's what has defined my music, In 1996 after the break up of the rock band I was in, I dove deeply into the finger style music of Nick Drake, Bert Jansch & Kelly Joe Phelps,, into jazz & exploring rarer forms of percussion... Poly-rhythms took the place of catchy hooks & the result became 1998's American Gothic, an album of stark contrast to the above mentioned genre of 'indie rock' artists, a contrast which is ever so apparent on the split 7" with Doug Martsch.

I kinda lost my point of reference after that, rock shows bored me & the folk scene made me itch, I took some time to get healthy, I played bass in a few projects & traveled. In September of 2000, It was with a little luck & fortune that I was accepted as one of six students to partake in a 12 day guitar seminar at the home of guitar great Pierre Bensusan in Bouresches, France. It was a trip that proved very beneficial academically, but more importantly, it led to a rekindled passion for music and a rediscovered point of reference.

I came back to the states & set out to record A Night In Gins Hollow in order to find some middle ground between the rock & folk that wasn't folk rock, the album also stands as my learning curve going from 8-track analog to digital recording