Hello and welcome to Strange Place Central! My name is Stephen Dwyer and this will be home to the music my friends and I have created over the years. I am the father of 5 sons and grandfather of 8, soon to be 9, wonderful grandbabies. My partner in all of this life is mom and grandma, Nicolette, or Nikki, the love of my life for the past 44 years. “Strange Place Central” comes from a song I wrote 40 years ago and it stuck with me. It is also the name of my home demo recording studio and collective music projects. Simply put, it is this life and this world...nothing is stranger.

     The impetus for all of this was a near miss at dying on August 28^th, 2024. That full story is for another page here, but suffice it to say that I’ve had better days...weeks...and months. So, short version - After having, and then not having, cancer in 2019, I was going in for my final yearly colonoscopy to clear me officially of that cancer...and it went about as wrong as it could have...emergency surgery and the loss of 12” or so of burst colon. Yeah, it sucked. But the aftermath gave me “The Song Inside”, 13 spoken word-ish songs that came out of nowhere, written to music that my longtime friend and writing partner, Mark Waldron, had been sending me for years that I hadn’t really given a true listen to...it was just waiting. 13 songs that came from the depths of me, just pouring out. I wrote the first three in November 2024, just a few weeks before my follow up surgery three months after the first surgery. The other 10 waited until January/February 2025, after I had recovered enough to go down to the studio again and grunt into a microphone...and grunt I did. Song of love after song of love and reflection. ALL are literally first takes, recorded as they were being written, one line, one verse, at a time. All because one of my biggest kindred spirits kept sending me music so that I would have it to bare my soul to my biggest kindred spirit of all time...my hero, Nikki, without which whom I’d literally be dead. I hope you appreciate them, thank you for listening.