Here, there and everywhere: singer-songwriter Terry Lee Hale’s seen them all. An Army brat, he was born in Texas and inspired to pick up the guitar by hearing an old Billy Haley 78 he found in a bedroom closet and seeing The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Terry Lee went to 10 different schools and learned young to travel easily. Graduating high school in Yakima, Washington and carrying an old Stella guitar, it was San Francisco and then across the country to Maine, living and learning. Time and the interstates carried him around the country until 1984 brought him, now with a 7-year-old daughter, 2 suitcases and a new Froggy Bottom guitar back to the Pacific Northwest and Seattle.

“Being a single parent was huge in shaping my life,” he explains. “It certainly delayed any touring and plenty of other things as well. No complaints though. You roll up your sleeeves and do what you have to do.”

Instead he began opening for local rock bands, acts like Soundgarden, Skin Yard, Screaming Trees and the Walkabouts and booking bands at venues around the city. For several years Terry Lee was a solo fixture on the Seattle scene, playing the clubs and bars around town with his strange open guitar tunings and his dark, dangerous songs. Seattle was changing. From being a backwater, it was suddenly America’s most liveable city, and the underground music scene that had raged around town was beginning to break out nationally. Seattle had been his home longer than anywhere else, but musically he still didn’t fit in. In a place supposedly free and easy, but where the musical lines were sharply etched, he remained the consummate outsider