Many of the key contributors who help with Songfacts can be found on the
Message Boards, but here are our writer/editors:
Carl Wiser
The founder of Songfacts, Carl was a radio disc jockey in Hartford, Connecticut who compiled a database of song information in the mid-'90s to use on the air. This database went online as Songfacts.com in 1999, and has grown considerably since. Carl is the managing editor of Songfacts and conducts some of the interviews.
Shawna Ortega
An ace transcriptionist, Shawna learned interview technique from listening to hundreds of interviews as part of her job. A talented writer and music enthusiast from Phoenix, Arizona, she does many of the Songfacts interviews. Get more Shawna and see if she'll do your transcriptions at
Turbo Transcripts.
Ed Pearce
From Ashford, Kent, England, Ed is a published author
(Food for Thought: Extraordinary Little Chronicles of the World) and an actor, appearing as everything from a pallbearer to a punter in various BBC productions, commercials and movies. As a child Ed was not allowed to be in his school choir, a rejection which could have turned him against music for the rest of his life. However, in his early teens he fell in love with the beats and melodies of '70s glam rock, but fortunately not the fashion. Since then he has maintained an interest and appreciation of most forms of music, with a few blind spots such as death metal, opera and Joni Mitchell. Ed does a great deal of writing and research for the database.
"Penguin" Pete Trbovich
A freelance writer/artist/developer in Des Moines, Iowa, Pete is a geek several times over: a music geek, history geek and a trivia geek. He writes many of our feature articles and uses his super-human research skills to compile some of our Songfacts database entries. His website is
penguinpetes.com.
Dan MacIntosh
Dan is a freelance writer from Norwalk, California with a big fancy degree in Communications from California State University, Fullerton. Specializing in Country and Contemporary Christian music, Dan does some of our interviews on Songfacts. He's also written for Popmatters and Spin.com. In the Songfacts band, he would play guitar, but so far record companies have not come calling.
Bruce Pollock
Bruce is a prolific music author from Connecticut whose books include
By the Time We Got to Woodstock: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Revolution of 1969 and
Working Musicians: Defining Moments from the Road, the Studio, and the Stage. Bruce writes some of the feature articles on Songfacts.
Maggie Grimason
A Hoosier armed with a degree in English from Indiana University, Maggie now makes her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She writes children's books and short stories, but is also a serious music junkie whose tastes range from Bob Dylan to Slayer. We keep her busy researching Songfacts entries, conducting interviews and writing feature stories.
Jess Grant
Jess is a music journalist based just outside of London, England. When she was just 15 years old, she started writing record reviews for her local newspaper, and nowadays Jess scribes for numerous arts publications, both online and in print. A fully-fledged guitar geek, Jess plays music when she's not writing about it.
Nicholas Tozier
Nick was born and raised in the cold, dark woods of Maine. In 2012 he made a cameo in Berklee professor Pat Pattison's book
Songwriting Without Boundaries, which also featured Grammy-winning songwriters like Andrea Stolpe and Gillian Welch. You can find more of his work at
song written, where he writes about songwriting, and at
Good Aural, where he writes about the many pleasures of listening.
