“Were it not for music,” Moreno begins, “I would not be here.  It was music that brought my parents together; it was music that kept me sane during insane times; and it has been and remains music that keeps the dark passenger at bay and brings joy, levity, and light to every day I sing, play, and write.”

Like many singer/songwriters, music is in Moreno’s DNA.  His mother was a child prodigy on the piano, playing organ for her father’s sizable Baptist church and later receiving a scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  During her freshman year, however, she met Moreno’s father—a young Spaniard who whistled like a warbler, crooned like Sinatra, and glided like Astaire.  Shortly thereafter, she quit school, married, and had a son, “JK”.  Although the marriage didn’t last, Moreno’s mother supported the two by playing piano bars and, after remarrying, she regularly orchestrated family trips to LA’s Music Center and the Hollywood Bowl to see the Philharmonic Orchestra and popular musicals.

Moreno, however, wanted to be a Beatle.  After receiving $1 for his 5th birthday, the youngster promptly walked to the other side of town where he purchased his first album, Meet the Beatles.  A year later, he was gifted his first guitar, and by the third grade he had penned his first song.  By the time he was in middle school he had graduated to a Radio Shack electric guitar (“The Realistic”), and soon he and his stepbrothers were playing dances for local junior high schools.  He continued performing in high school, providing warm-up and half-time entertainment for his school’s varsity basketball games. 

Once in college, Moreno broke his bank on a “blond-on-blond” Ibanez Concord acoustic, and by the time he was in graduate school he had added John Prine, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and other balladeers to his pantheon of favorite rockers—Sting, Henley, Gilmore, and Knopfler, to name a few.  It was also during this time Moreno began experimenting with harmonies, and he and his roommates soon developed some aptitude for crafting the 3rd and 5th vocal parts of favorite cover as well as original songs.  “Harmony is where the fun is,” he liked to say. 

Then he quit.  After receiving his doctorate in psychology, Moreno went to work.  And taught.  And published.  And saw patients. And married.  And started a family.  Little did he know it would be several counseling centers, seven hospitals, twice as many prisons, dozens of research papers, hundreds of patients, thousands of forensic reports, and twenty-five years before he would play and sing again.

“Why don’t you play with us?” Moreno’s accountant said to him one cloudy day in 2012, “every Sunday afternoon, in my garage.  It will help your mood.”  Well, the insightful CPA prescribed just the right medicine. Stuck in a protracted, mid-life malaise, Moreno showed up in the numbers guy’s garage, started singing, and mirabile dictu, was relieved of his melancholia.  “So I came back. Again and again.”  Like the downtrodden uncle who crashes on the couch for a night or two – “and then never leaves” – Moreno dusted off his ‘76 Ibanez, consulted a vocal coach, and jammed and gigged with The Tax Band the next 10 years.

Except during tax season, when his accountant went on hiatus and left the band with nowhere to play.  “I didn’t know what to do,” Moreno noted. So, like so many times in the past, he turned to writing.  Initially, it was several research papers (e.g., “Scapegoating in Group Psychotherapy”), then another rewrite of his debut novel, A Duty to Betray (published in 2014 by Oak Tree Press).  Then it was songwriting, full throttle.  His first songs were about his daughter, soon to empty the nest ("Six Thousand Places"), his complicated relationship with his dying father ("Find Where We Are"), his grief stricken stepmother ("Mourning Lullaby", reviewed by Glen Starkey in the 4/9/20 issue of The New Times), his better half ("Good at You"), and his despair over the steady drip of deaths due to the dysregulation of guns ("Guns Don’t Kill"). 

“Ever thought of recording?” a tall, lanky fellow asked Moreno one night after a show.  “Call me,” he said, handing Moreno his card, “and we’ll get your music out there.”  Well, “out there” he did, and within a year Moreno and central coast producer, Rob Vermeulen, arranged, recorded, and produced, Elsinore, Moreno’s first album.  “Like I say in a testimonial on Rob’s website,” Moreno notes, “if someone would have told me 30 years ago that someday I’d be crafting, recording, and performing my own songs, I would have given them my card and suggested they call me.”

Elsinore, however, could not have dropped at a worse time—August, 2020, right in the thick of Covid-19.  Rather than complain and wait for the pandemic to subside, however, Moreno and Vermeulen got to work on Moreno’s next collection, He Smokes With God.  The album was largely based on Moreno’s work with psychiatric and forensic patients and includes songs about the function of a delusion ("He Smokes With God"), friends who like us better when we’re down ("Dark Weather Friend"), hope ("Come With Me"), OCD ("Sick With Thought"), acceptance ("Pitchfork Princess"), and other stories from the couch.  Then his producer really messed with his head.

“How’d you like to record this one in Nashville?” Vermeulen asked.  “I know some people, and there’s some things we can do there that we can’t do here.”  Well, “some people” had quite the musical pedigree, drummer Steve Latanation, for instance, having kept the beat for Agent Orange back in the punk/new wave era, and multi-instrumentalist (pedal steel/violin/mandolin), Fats Kaplin, having toured with John Prine just before the icon died.  Sound engineer, Steve Leiweke, had just finished recording a fellow who toured with Emmylou Harris, and Yackland Studio had all the instruments, recording gear, sound rooms, and other equipment one could possibly need.  “We were like kids in a candy store,” Moreno mused.  “It was pretty exciting.”

So now what?  With Elsinore and He Smokes with God properly launched, what’s next?  “I’ve got a couple ideas,” Moreno muses.  “One is a concept collection on mortality (Clouds Look Closer Now), and the other tackles making peace with discomfort (Well Undone).  And I know I’ve got to promote Elsinore and He Smokes with God, and I’ll continue with other things I enjoy like performing, teaching, and seeing patients. But one thing is for sure,” he concludes, “I’ll continue to write.  One way or the other, I will write.  Like Steven King once chortled, ‘What makes you think I have a choice?’”