Early Life and Education
Dave Carter was born in Oxnard, California. His father was a mathematician and a petroleum engineer and his mother was a science teacher and a charismatic Christian. Carter was raised in Oklahoma and Texas and would draw on his rural upbringing in many of his songs. He studied classical piano from age 4 to about age 12, when he took up guitar. At 17, he left home to hitchhike around the country, especially the Midwestern United States (Great Plains area). After graduating with degrees in music (cello) and fine arts from the University of Oklahoma, he moved to Portland, Oregon, where he continued his education at Portland State University, earning a degree in mathematics. He began an advanced degree in mathematics, but a personal epiphany led him to realize that this was not to be his field. He went on to study what he called "the psychology of mystical experience" at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto and the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and worked as an embedded systems programmer for several years before taking up music full-time in the mid-1990s. Carter was greatly influenced by mythologist Joseph Campbell, who visited his college, and American mystic Carlos Castaneda. He was also influenced by the American landscape, Arthurian mythology, the environment, and transcendental psychology.
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Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
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