Leif the music lover and his guitars

Leif loved music from the time he was very young and had extremely eclectics tastes. He played electric guitar beginning in junior high when we lived at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and played bass briefly in a band when he was a junior in high school at Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico. The photo of him above is from the one and only performance of that band at Antilles High School, in the spring of 1992.

That year, he also designed and made his own electric guitar with an unusual neck and fingerboard connection the came up with to make fingering high notes easier. I'll have to post a photo of it one of these days. Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of him playing it.

During those years, he practiced and learned to play some of his favorite guitar solos from rock albums. He had huge music collection and those albums from the 1980s were still among his songs on iTunes.

I wish he had continued to play throughout the years. His guitars always meant a lot to him, and he displayed them with the amp in his living room wherever he lived, even if he didn't play. I know the "language" of the guitar solo spoke to him . . . though many other kinds of music did, too. He listened to everything from Bach to heavy metal, from punk rock to some techno genres, from Kitaro to Mariah Carey. Listening to his music now makes me cry. Most of what he loved is full of emotion.

Leif gave his first guitar to his nephew, Marcus. We hope he will learn to play it.