Dave Tutin

From about the age of 9 all I wanted to be was a writer. From age 10 I wanted to be a songwriter. From age 11 I wanted to be a singer/songwriter - although it would be a few years more before people started using that title!

I did not enjoy school. I found studying hard. Too much was going on in my young mind that they didn't teach at school.

With no formal education beyond age 18, I was lucky to discover advertising. It paid a lot of bills that music wasn't paying.

In the end it took over. And while I still wrote songs, my musical aspirations were put to one side for many, many years.

When my father died in 2002 it provoked in me a wave of songwriting. And I liked what I was writing. Luckily so did my best friend Craig Snyder. And that's how he came to produce my double CD set Raised In Vain and Afterthought.

Not many people put out their first album at age 54. I did. And I'm proud of it.

These are the songs I wanted to write when I was 16. But I hadn't lived them yet.