Lorna spent early childhood summers in Massachusetts, singing and playing with four generations of self-taught musicians. When her family moved to San Francisco, she made a doll house underneath the baby grand piano, enveloped in the resonance of vibrating strings and her father's feet dancing on the pedals. She daydreamed on busses to and from lessons with a Norwegian concert pianist and danced in the opera house with a full orchestra in the pit.
At age thirteen, her family moved to land populated by redwood and madrone, live oak and manzanita, where she helped build an octagon shaped house, learned to drive on a mile of curvy unpaved road, and taught herself to play guitar. She traveled around Europe with an alto recorder in her backpack and began playing oboe on April Fools day at the age of twenty-one.
While living in Seattle, where her daughter, Thea Maria, was born, Lorna worked at a produce stand, cutting huge blocks of cheese in the dark before the dawn, selling flats of raspberries to Bellevue housewives from the bed of a battered green Toyota truck, picking peaches in moonlit orchards in Yakima, Washington.
Lorna began teaching kindergarten music classes and giving piano lessons to her younger siblings while she was still in high school. She started writing her own songs forty years ago, when none of the songs she knew said precisely what she wanted to say. She lives on a ridge in the Santa Cruz mountains, teaching music lessons in a renovated chicken barn and singing to the plants in her garden, where the bees flock to the blossoms of her first crop of biodynamic phacelia.
