专辑简介

Don has been playing guitar and writing songs for 54 years. He got his first guitar-- a Harmony arch-top-- at age 14 in a blackjack game while he was supposed to be in Sunday School. He played it until his fingers bled, then waited 'til they healed and played some more. His earliest musical influences went from Beethoven to Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and from Mozart and Handel to the Everly Brothers, John Hammond and James Taylor. In recent years he's only listened to stuff his friends turned him onto; FM radio is a last resort.

The son of a seminary professor and theologian, Don blew the whole church thing off as a bad deal before he even reached his teens, trying to numb the leftover pain inside with whatever he could find; music helped some, as did sex and drugs. Then, in 1974, he experienced God so powerfully that his life and music suddenly had purpose: To tell all kinds of people who God really is-- a God of love, compassion, and eternal forgiveness.

That mission has grown and changed with passing years and more experience; Don now describes his songwriting career as more of a diary of what he's learned during that hejira, and he hopes that you can relate to the interior spaces he's visited.

This newest album, 'Forever My Friend', is approximately his 21st (he says he's lost count), if you don't include various compilations. It contains some of his best story-songs yet, as well as others meant to soothe and heal the savaged heart. "Religion can do more damage to your soul than all the governments of the world," Don writes in one article. "By its very nature, all religion is violent and toxic. The God that I know calls to you and says, 'Come away with Me; I know a place where you'll be safe from all of that'."