Three Song Stories

Clarke is a musician and artist whose improvised and mostly unstructured guitar pieces built up from multiple improvised layers create a dreamlike, atmospheric soup of sound. His first solo album "Hear Us Through the Hole in Thin Air" came out in 2020. His next "A Theory of Color," is in the final stages of production now. In 1981 he put together a band that would go on to be notorious in the Texa...

Lance Wissinger is a speaker, entrepreneur, and political strategist whose life took a turn in 2003 when a car accident with him behind the wheel led to a five-year prison sentence for vehicular manslaughter.   While incarcerated, he founded successful programs that empowered fellow inmates through business planning, public speaking, and personal growth. He went on to become an advocate for justic...

Dan Mangan is a Vancouver, BC-based musician. Dan has played Jimmy Kimmel Live, Glastonbury, and sold out Massey Hall, as well as scored soundtracks for television and feature film. He is also a co-founder of Side Door, a marketplace platform connecting artists with alternative venue spaces for in-person & online shows. Dan has won 2 JUNO Awards and is thrice Polaris Music Prize-nominated for...

Phonte Coleman is best known as a founding member of hip-hop group Little Brother , and as one of the co‑hosts of the podcast Questlove Supreme with Questlove.  In the late 90s, Phonte met Thomas “Big Pooh” Jones and Patrick “9th Wonder” Douthit and they started making music together as the hip-hop collective, Justus League and released their first album The Listening in 2003. They changed their n...

Joe Harley makes music under his moniker Hotel Life, which signed to 9 Lives Records in 2023. He began playing guitar in the Fort Myers bar scene in 1993 with a number of bands including Potato Gun and Strip Club Moms. Potato Gun played the official grand opening of FGCU in 1997. Joe moved to St Pete in 2000 to be in an original rock band there and then moved back to Matlacha in 2002 where he got...

 Petar Kodzas was born in what’s now Serbia but was, at the time, Yugoslavia. During college, Petar toured and recorded as a lutenist with an early music ensemble; he played over 100 shows at the professional musical theatre, sat in jazz sessions, and performed throughout the former Yugoslavia as a musical ambassador for the international organization Jeunesses Musicales. Petar was also Senior Ins...

Jameson Yingling is a filmmaker, philosopher, and social entrepreneur who's work focuses on existentialism, phenomenology of aging and death, postcolonialism, and ecological interdependence. He is an FGCU and Teach For America alum, and he was a founding partner of the Bonita Springs media company Sugarshack. Right now Jameson is spending time as a guest lecturer at FGCU helping to lead what’s cal...

Desmond Meade is a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow; a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and having been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine. He's also’s author of the 2020 book “Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens.” Desmond is President of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition -- the organization that led the successful e...

Edward “Teddy” Byrne is a Producer and Writer at WGCU on the “Southwest Florida in Focus” TV show team. After earning degrees in Journalism and Psychology from Keene State College Teddy settled in Southwest Florida starting with a job with WINK News.  As a Sports Producer there, he had the opportunity to tag along with the FGCU Men’s Basketball team during their epic “Dunk City” adventure to the S...

 Lainey Schooltree is a musician, comedian, streamer, and former half of the musical comedy duo The Steamy Bohemians . She then formed the solo art rock project Schooltree. When the pandemic hit, she began performing on Twitch and found that live-streaming offered the interdisciplinary playground she'd been after. What began as a temporary pivot became a long-term transformation and these days she...

Joshua Conyers is an Assistant Professor of Voice at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, and a Grammy-nominated Baritone who is known for his captivating performances and recognized as one of the leading dramatic voices of today. He has performed with The Metropolitan Opera, Seattle Opera, Washington National Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, English National Opera, New York P...

Bill Bowen is a singer/songwriter/computer engineer who grew up in Fort Myers but headed off to New York City in the 90s, in part to live the big city life and in part to be able to see Moxy Früvous shows.  Bill is also the former roommate and Foosball partner of WGCU’s own Mike Kiniry. SONG 1: "Garden Party" released in 1972 by Rick Nelson & The Stone Canyon Band on the album of the same name...

Andrew Lipke is a composer, producer, arranger, conductor, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and educator who has toured for more than a decade with the Led Zeppelin tribute band Get The Led Out and performed as a vocalist with Steve Hackman's Brahms V Radiohead symphonic synthesis ; and he collaborates with World Café Live on music education programs for underserved youth in the Philadelphia area....

Mickela Mallozzi is host and Executive Producer of Bare Feet with Mickela Mallozzi , a PBS travel series that showcases the diversity of dance from around the world Mickela is a professional dancer and trained musician who had a dream in 2010 about travelling the world with a camera while dancing in the lives of everyday people. Since dreaming that dream she’s collected four Emmy Awards for the sh...

Christina Goh is a French composer, poet, and vocalist whose multidisciplinary universe includes digital art, poetry and musical creation. She’s the initiator of a vocal technique for accompanying high range percussion and she’s a member of the Board of Directors of the French Association for Percussion.  Christina has performed her music from Indonesia to Canada, demonstrating her vocal technique...

Kim Dunham was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Michigan. She moved to Connecticut after high school and lived there for about six years before moving to Florida in 1999. Kim’s been working at WGCU since 2019 as part of the membership team.  SONGS AND LINKS The original opening 20th Century Fox intro into the original theatrical release of Star Wars in 1977.  https://youtu.be/oJguy6wSYyI?si=SRw...

Madison Morris is a singer-songwriter who focuses on bringing his storytelling nature to light over top of an Americana sound - playing more than 200 live performances throughout the year as a full-time musician. He co-wrote "We're All Still Here" with his wife in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian after they were displaced from their home and lost so much. It was included on the official ballot for G...

Scott Turow is a writer and attorney. He is the author of fourteen works of fiction, including Presumed Innocent , and most recently, Presumed Guilty , which hit the shelves in January of this year. All of his novels have been New York Times bestsellers. His works have been the basis for film and television projects…last year Apple TV+ released an eight-part limited series based on Presumed Innoce...

Tom Bayles is Senior Environmental Reporter at WGCU. A lifelong Florida journalist, Tom has covered stories in 67 counties, including plenty of hurricanes. Tom covers climate change, biodiversity, water quality and quantity issues, Everglades restoration efforts, endangered and invasive species, beach and coastal issues, and the intersections of global warming and the economy, politics, religion,...

Mary Bichner is an orchestral composer with synesthesia - that’s the neurological condition that allows her to see splashes of specific colors in her mind’s eye when she hears their corresponding pitches. Mary has served as composer-in-residence at The Vasilicos of Santorini in Greece, for which she composed a new string quartet work inspired by the colors of the world-famous Santorini sunset; she...

Randy Kambic has written hundreds of articles for The Fort Myers News-Press, Southwest Florida Parent & Child Magazine, The Banner, Florida Weekly and now The Naples Press. He compiled a regular weekly section on recreational tennis and golf for the Coastal Life section of the News-Press for more than two years; Prior to that, he working in public relations in NYC for more than 25 years for se...

Jeff James is a Director of Professional TTEC Digital - and he's also the author of a self-published children's book called Brainbows: A First Reference Book for Very Young Minds . He describes himself as a music geek who spends his spare time listening to music, playing music (guitar mostly), or exploring music and looking for songs and artists that aren't famous but should be. See omnystudio.com...

Renée Benmeleh is a multi-cultural vocalist, composer, instrumentalist and teacher. She has been joyfully singing Improv, Jazz, World, Ritual, and her own Original music for more than 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s the founder and agile facilitator at Sound Nourishment where she leads monthly classes, workshops, and events. She is also a Drum Circle Facilitator, and a childhood musi...

Chris Keys has been in the restaurant business for just over 30 years and has spent almost 18 of those years with Melting Pot. He’s been an Owner/Operator of the Fort Myers restaurant since 2018. Before he settled in with Melting Pot, Chris worked with a few different national restaurants that include Checkers, Lonestar Steakhouse, and TGIFriday's. But he says most places he’s worked at were indep...

Judge Michael Cicconetti is a retired Municipal Court Judge who served for more than 25 years in his hometown of Painesville, OH. He gained a nationwide reputation during his time on the bench for handing down sentences that could be accurately described as unique in certain cases. For instance, teenagers who flattened tires on school buses were ordered to throw a picnic for the school children wh...