Growing up in the small southern Oregon town of Cave Junction (pop. 1995), Derek Gregg has always played music. “We were poor, so I would beat on pots and pans with sticks. It wasn’t until I was 15 that I knew (music) was going to be my life. Nothing else made sense to me as a teenager. I found musical people to look up to and it just seemed to make sense.”

Though he began songwriting when he was 16 and played in local jam bands, he admits that he “might still be in Oregon milking goats” if he hadn’t reconnected with his birth father, Mark Gregg, guitarist for the Coachella Valley’s own Dude Jones Band. “He said I should be playing music and offered me a place to stay while I got a band together. We’re great friends now. I love my dad. I really respect him. He gave me another shot at life.”

When he was starting out as a young songwriter, Gregg was greatly influenced by Kurt Cobain, for not only his music, but “because of his authenticity. I had always picked up on an honesty from Cobain,” he says. As he has matured as a musician, though, he’s found himself heavily influenced by songwriters like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Johnny Cash. “Then, everything changed for me. I realized I didn’t want to say anything if it wasn’t completely honest. I decided I was going to figure out what I was most afraid of telling, and that’s what I was going to write about.”

The Palm Springs-based musician has built a solid reputation and following in the Coachella Valley music scene, first playing with Hive Mind and most recently with his own trio, the Derek Jordan Gregg band. Though he can rock with the best of them in songs like “Rooftops” (which puts one in mind of Elvis Costello), his songwriting skills are most evident in some mellower ballads such as “Madonna.”  

“If you were the sun/I’d go blind/for just one look in your eyes.”

During this past summer, Greg steadily dropped pairs of songs leading up to the release of his ten track album, “Gemini: Home and Abroad.” Gregg, a Gemini, says the album explores his own duality. “Everything, to me, is a constant striving for balance. And usually failing.”

It’s a typically forthright and honest statement from a songwriter who doesn’t know any other way to tell a story.