I grew up in Sheffield, England, where I went to the same high school as the linguists Andrew Spencer, Mike Barlow and J. C. Smith, though I did not know any of them at that time. I received my first degree from the University of Liverpool (Linguistics and Communication Studies) and then moved to America for my Ph.D. in Linguistics (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). I have spent most of my professional life at Stanford.
Since my teenage years I have been playing bass guitar as much (as little) as my other commitments allow, and every so often I appear in Dead Tongues with my colleague Ivan Sag and various other linguists and friends. My bass hero is James Jamerson, unquestionably the greatest bass player of all time, who played on most of the Motown recordings in the 1960s and early 1970s. Although he died in 1983, he features prominently in the 2002 Motown movie Standing in the Shadows of Motown. My own playing was heavily influenced by Jack Casady of the Jefferson Airplane, Jerry Scheff, who plays on the Doors album L.A. Woman, and Max Bennett, who played on Joni Mitchell's albums in the mid-1970s. (Simply put, I play minor chords like Jack Casady and major chords like Jerry Scheff.)
My interest in playing music is perpetuated by my continuing interest in contemporary music, and I keep myself continually up to date via the wonderful invention of internet streaming radio. In particular, I listen as much as possible to two radio stations from London, XFM and BBC6, where you can hear lots of great music.