Bari Koral

I grew up on Long Island and attended Syracuse University, where I majored in Television, Radio and Film (and boys and the Grateful Dead). I thought I was aiming for a career at PBS or some other philosophical network, but on a whim on vacation in Canada, I bought a guitar. I always loved to sing and in high school, I was the original Glee; singing in school and taking the train to NYC for afternoon rehearsals at the First Act Children’s Theatre Off Broadway.

About one year before I graduated college, I picked up the guitar under my bed, and in a week I was writing songs. Within a month I had my first gig of mostly original material. All those years of music instantly came flooding back–just needing a vehicle, and the guitar drew the music out of me.

Suddenly I was pursuing an entirely new path. I did get a job at Court TV in NYC (in the early days when they actual covered cool trials that challenged the First Amendment, but unfortunately the network soon spiraled into more trashy territory—climaxing with OJ Simpson and Jeffery Dahmer). Very unfortunately, I was named “Chief TV Researcher” on the Jeffery Dahmer trial. I had to write chyrons for the broadcast (the text that you read when you see a talking head on TV). I wrote notes like: “head found in refrigerator.” These were not my proudest career moments.