I have been playing music my whole life. People always ask me when I began playing music, and have to tell them from the start. I cannot remember not playing guitar and singing songs. My mom, Theresa Carswell, always sang around me as a child; and she still has wonderful voice. She is also the Karaoke Queen.

I spent a lot of time with my grandma--who would sing and dance around the house to Elvis and Kenny Rogers. My grandma--whom I call Nan-- was the first person to teach me how to make up my own songs.

My father, Walt Redmond Sr., still plays melodic, soulful guitar in a band. And I'm not talking about playing Pat Boone tunes. I'm talking about Hendrix, Zeppelin, Allman Bros.—basically, all the good shit a young musician needs to hear from his Dad.
I always paid attention, watching what he was doing with his fingers and what he did to get the those cool ass tones. Later, I would find out that the Fender Strat and the Marshall he was playing wasn’t hurting his tone any.
After being my father’s slave of the four bar blues, somewhere around 10 or 11(while he whaled out screaming blues licks for what seemed to be hours) I started learning how to make my way around the guitar neck myself.
I went through all the phases most young guitar players go through—like the Eddie Van Halen phase (which at the time everybody wanted to learn Eruption and finger tap or play as fast as Malmsteen).

I started many garage bands and couldn’t ever find a singer--which was really the thing that turned me into a lead vocalist. That was cool, because the singer was the one who got all the girls anyway…. HA HA!
After cutting my teeth for a few years in the garage, I started playing in local bars around town with my uncle Reg as my chaperone. It was Reggie who drove me to the gigs, the music stores, to practice, and to probably over 100 concerts. He got guitar picks with my name on them—not to mention all of the guitar gear he bought me over the years. Thanks Reg!

I was lucky to have received so much support from my family when I was a kid. My family has always stood behind me.
From 1989-90, I was in a band called “Scoundrel”. We did some recording and regularly played shows. Half of our material was cover songs and the other half was original music. We had a pretty good following around my home state of Virginia. There was a time when it was looking as if we were going to get signed. But as fate would have it, the band fell apart; and that actually turned out to be a good thing. I had a lot of fun in that band though.

By the time I was 18, I moved to Austin, Texas (where I started playing with players that really challenged me as an artist and as a musician). I started a band with Danny Stapleton. Danny was already an established guitar player at 17. I had met him the following summer when Scoundrel played in Austin. Playing in a band with Danny and moving to Austin raised the bar on everything for me. I was ready to grow beyond the cover bands that I had played with in Virginia. It was a very exciting time for me. There were so many great bands in Austin that were playing their own music and playing it for hundreds of people. It didn’t take long for Danny and I to get our band Psycho Groove rocking and playing for pretty large crowds in Austin. Danny and I played together off and on for about five years, traveling around TX and going back and forth from Los Angeles in search of the perfect rhythm section. I had some auditions and moonlighted with some very popular artist that were big in the 80’s; I will not mention the names of the artists, because it wouldn’t have been good for my career anyway; but in hindsight, I think they were great experiences.

The early 90’s were a confusing time for all rock musicians, because everything had been wiped off the map by NIRVANA. Then you had every other Seattle band that came out after them. And that was cool because we got a lot of good music out of that city; it was very refreshing. But that also soon passed. Danny and I gave it one more try with a line up we called “Lo & Behold”. The band logged in quite a bit of airtime on ZROCK and played some great shows around Texas. Times were changing and so were the musical tastes of Danny and I. Needing to get back to my roots and regroup mentally and musically, I moved back to Virginia.

When I returned back home, I spent a lot of time just going out to jam nights and getting back to having fun playing music—which is something I had lost somewhere between LA and Austin. Back home in Virginia, I started writing and demo’ing songs. I met a guitar player named Mike Doyle and bass player named Cliff Hultquist (a.k.a. Fagtractor), and I formed the band Morning Electra. We demo’ed a couple of songs at B-Digital studio and soon ended up getting rotation on FM 99 WNOR thanks to Mike’s DJ friend Rod Fitzwell. Rod would sneak on the demo whenever he could and get a lot positive feed back from it. It was cool to be back home and getting airplay on a local radio station.

I started to realize also around this time that I didn’t have to play with my volume at 11 to get off. A lot of the songs I was writing were written on the acoustic. There was a bluesier, more mature Walt Redmond coming to life. Inspired by seeing my friends in an acoustic duo called “Clearwater” (Don Butcher vocals, guitar, harmonica and David “J” Johnson on vocals, bass and guitar), I started doing acoustic gigs by myself. Don and David showed me that you can go out have fun playing good music and make money doing what you love, and so I did just that. Mourning Electra played around town for about a year. Following several member/line-up changes, the band became known as the Walt Redmond Band--for lack of a better name. We would play my originals and select classic covers but with a louder more modern Rock twist to them. It was great fun—lots of beer and lots of laughs
I have been making a living playing music ever since.