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Biography

Tom is a singer/songwriter who began his career as a teenager, placing songs with Peer Southern Music and Famous Music Publishing.

From the midseventies through the eighties, Tom pursued a career in advertising, writing and producing countless TV and Radio commercials. He penned and produced jingles performed by Michael Bolton, Marc Cohn, Ry Cooder, Fats Domino, Dave Edmunds, Allen Toussaint, Jimmy Buffett, .38 Special, Kenny Rogers, George Benson and others. He won numerous awards, including Clios for Best Musical Campaign for Miller Genuine Draft’s It’s As Real As It Gets and Xerox’s Revolution campaign with The Art of Noise. He also garnered a Cannes Silver Lion for Hyundai’s debut campaign, Cars That Make Sense.

During that time his work also appeared in several movies, including Beer, Night of the Creeps, Excessive Force, Caught in the Crossfire, Girlfriends, The Key and the Martha Coolidge film Not a Pretty Picture. The Key, which he scored with Jonathan Helfand, won the 1996 National Education Fiction Video Award.

Tom left advertising in the nineties and returned to his first love, songwriting. “You Got Something on the Side,” “100 Real Good Reasons to Sing the Blues” and “That’s My Version of a Good Idea,” which he cowrote with Martha Trachtenberg and International Blues Challenge Award winner Toby Walker, appear on Toby’s internationally acclaimed CDs, Toby Walker Plays Well with Others and Just Rolled In, both of which Tom produced. His production credits also include It’s About Time by Martha Trachtenberg, which was featured in the New York Times and Newsday and is played on acoustic-music oriented radio stations throughout the country.

His first album, Hodge Podge, was released locally in 1997 and was chosen as an Album of the Year by the Long Island Press.

In 2004, Tom released The Web of Life, a collection of educational songs for upper elementary students. The album came about, he says, “Because I couldn’t find any academically-oriented music that I thought would interest my 11-year- old son. There are plenty of ‘Wheels on the Bus’ type songs out there, which are great for little kids, but not much for his age group.” The CD has since become a favorite learning tool in classrooms across the country.

His first national commercial release, 40 Years Later, hit the streets in 2007 and was awarded Album of the Year by Newsday. Tom says, “In a funny way, it took me forty years to be able to write 40 Years Later. I wanted to write about issues that were important to us baby boomers back in the sixties, but looked at from today’s perspective.”

For the next few years Tom, along with his longtime collaborator Mike Morrison, worked on music and sound design for the science-fiction adventure game Prominence. It was released in 2015 and received high praise from adventure gamers the world over, and the staff of IndieGames.com picked Prominence as one of the best games of 2015.

In 2016, Tom and Mike formed InStock Music, a company that specializes in music for commercial use for various media platforms. Their tracks have been heard on A&E Biography, Animal Planet, MTV and AMCtv American Haunters, among others.

Tom’s most recent project is Demo Listen Derby 2017. He is posting an original song each week for the whole year on YouTube. He says, “What makes this project different and exciting is that I'm asking for feedback from the listeners. I want to know which songs they like – or don’t like – and if they have any ideas of what they'd like to hear differently.” At the end of the year, he’ll perform in concert the songs that were the most popular (incorporating his favorite suggestions from the community) and make all the recordings available for download.

Currently Tom lives on Long Island with his wife and son.