We found some old cassette tapes in my parents’ house, and I just got them transferred to digital files. Most of them are various recordings I made of me playing guitar and singing when I was in high school and college (some of them with different bands or duos I played with), but one of them was a recording that was made over a few months when I was two and a half to three years old. I’ve just spent one of the most entertaining 20-minute periods of my life listening to my early musical beginnings. First, there’s the songwriting. At age two and a half I have evidence of one of the first songs I wrote: "There's a little grasshopper that hops around." There were a few other (and even longer) variations on – or verses of -- that song, including one about a little baby in the house (my brother had just been born) and one about a little birdy. And I give my parents credit for encouraging my early songwriting efforts; at some point my father says “what did the birdy do? Why don’t you sing about that?” and my mother says, when we’re talking about whatever I’d just done in my day, “you can make up songs about that.” (Other important insights into my childhood and my oddly precocious use of language: at some point I’m singing We Wish You a Merry Christmas and get to the “figgy pudding” verse. I stop and ask “what’s figgy pudding” and my mother says (remember, I’m two and a half at this point) "well, it's an English pudding that has plums and raisins and figs in it. Now do you want to sing about wanting figgy pudding?”) And then for most of the rest of the tape I was running through the repertoire of songs I knew at that age. Let me just tell you that you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a two and a half year old sing “The Foggy Foggy Dew.” I’m completely amazed that at two and a half I knew a whole range of songs, many of them not the standard toddler set. My repertoire suggests that it’s true that I really have spent my whole life living in a folk cave, as I suspected. Finally at the very end of the tape came the payoff. At this point I had just turned three, and I’m singing pretty much all the verses (or all the verses I know at this point) to Darling Clementine. We must have found this tape at some point a decade or two back (and then lost it again), because I knew this recording existed, and I’m thrilled to finally have a digital copy of it. Guess I really was destined, from an early age, for a career as s folk musician.