He spent his preteen years at St Michael's College in Worcestershire, England on a singing scholarship, training in classical music, performing two services a day as head chorister, and learning the rudiments of piano and cello.
The early records of Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn turned him on to open-tuned solo guitar music, leading him to Michael Hedges, Leo Kottke, and eventually the '80s soundscapes of Johnny Marr, Adrian Belew, and Andy Summers.
[2] White Acre stayed in Colorado long enough to be voted Denver's "Best Solo Performer" in 1987 [3] and to share the stage with Bobby McFerrin, Suzanne Vega, Al Di Meola, Big Head Todd & The Monsters, The Washington Squares, and one of his first guitar heroes, Roy Buchanan.
After cutting two albums, the Windham Hill styled "Atlantis Ripples" and the folk-funk "9 Songs," in the recording studio he built, White Acre left the Rocky Mountains and landed in Los Angeles in the late summer of 1988.
[1] In 1990, the earliest incarnation of White Acre's acoustic pop vision, Big Planet, won the Don Kirshner Tanqueray Rocks Talent Contest, a national competition culminating in a battle of the bands at the Ritz Carlton in New York City in October 1990.
In 1993, Big Planet's rock song, "Push the Boundaries," was featured in the heavily played national radio commercial for the Chevy Camaro[7] which gave White Acre the resources to finance his first ADAT digital studio.
The album received high marks and praise from critics who compared the effort to Sonic Youth and Weezer, but it failed to catch on with a large audience.