Former band of Laurie Morvan See Also: www.last.fm/music/Laurie+Morvan+Band & The Laurie Morvan Band: www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/The+Laurie+Morvan+Band It could have been a disastrous beginning. My womanizing, alcoholic father walked out on my mother and me when I was five years old. We were living in a little white house on Bittersweet Lane in New Lenox, Illinois. The vivid, terrible memory of being awakened in the middle of the night, my half-sister and I clinging to each other, screaming and being pulled apart so my father could pack her and my two half brothers (the only family I had ever known) into the car and drive away is still as clear and cold today as it was all those years ago. While it was a great struggle, and money was always in short supply, my mother was a hard worker who never accepted charity, and we managed to live a simple life in an upstairs apartment in Joliet, Illinois. My mom eventually met a wonderful man, fell in love, and when I was just turning 13, they married. Things got quite a bit easier then, with two incomes in the household, and they even managed to buy property in a rural town called Plainfield upon which we built our house with our own hands. I grew up surrounded by all kinds of music. My step-father, who I call my Dad, was a hard core country fan and wasn't interested in having anything else on the radio in his presence. My mother listened to the lighter side of rock and pop (when Dad wasn't around!) and I was a typical midwest teen...