Who the hell is Shawn "Yogi" Farley, and why should you care? I dunno about that second part there, but I'll tell ya all about the first bit, OK? Hi! I'm a thirty-something guitarist, bassist, singer, composer, whatever based in Seattle, Washington. Born in Jacksonville, Florida and raised just south of Washington, D.C. in northern Virginia, I've been playing the guitar and writing (or attempting to write) music for nineteen years. Inspired as a youth by the Beatles, Kasey Kasem's American Top 40 and any movie soundtrack with John Williams music on it, I began to focus exclusively on music at age 15. I had the good luck to be surrounded by kids my age who were extremely talented, and were already experimenting with songwriting. And back then, we all wanted to be Edward Van Halen, so I spent a lot of hours sitting in dumbfounded amazement trying to figure out Van Halen tunes. Fat lotta good THAT did me, eh? Wanna see me go WEEDLY WEEDLY WEEDLY WEEEE on my guitar? No? Can I offer you a taco then?

But I digress.

So I graduated from high school (please hold your applause), and at first I thought I must do what all parents want their kids to do these days, head off to higher education. After attending college at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia for a year, I decided that music was my true calling and that off to music school I must go. A good idea in theory (no pun intended), and I was shortly thereafter accepted into the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. The year before heading off to Berklee, I was in a band that christened itself Copper Einstein, which became the first group I was in that did extensive recording, in Sean Hester's burgeoning home studio. Anyway, off to Berklee, then. That was a lot of fun, but school doesn't last forever, so eventually the day came when I had to decide what to do next.

So off to Norfolk, Virginia I went (don't ask why, just nod in understanding, thanks), and started a band called Skeptics which played the limited bar scene in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Nags Head, NC area. A year later, I left Skeptics, moved yet AGAIN (this time to Blacksburg, VA, home of Virginia Tech) and joined a cover band called Funhouse made up of childhood friends that played the southern-Virginia college scene. Playing in Funhouse, I had the opportunity to play very well-attended and well-received shows. That's when I really learned how to perform live for an audience. We would play these big outdoor parties for 3,000 people; many of whom had actually come to see us on purpose. Of course, we were doing covers, so there was a built-in acceptance for us, but we did a lot of extras that other bands like us didn't do. We put on a show. We began to believe that we were Rock Gods of Destiny. PHEWWWWW...

It was about this time that I picked up the "Yogi" nickname. Believe it or not, the reason it came about was that there were two people named "Shawn" in Funhouse, and my bandmates decided we needed nicknames to differentiate us. Mine was Yogi, and it stuck. There are people who I have known for a long time now, who even if tortured in horrible ways could not tell you what my "real" name is. They've never known it. This strikes me as perversely funny. OK, back to the story:

Funhouse released a self-produced CD called Oom Fala Skepsis in 1992 that included six songs that I wrote or co-wrote, which sold well to our "fans" (such as they were) in Virginia. Frustrated with the Virginia/D.C. music "scene" (or lack thereof) I then moved with band members to Seattle in the summer of 1993. I know, I know, it sounds like we were trying to take advantage of the newly-minted "Seattle Music Scene", but believe it or not, we didn't come to Seattle because of Nirvana and all the other bands that had exploded out of here. It sounds like fiction, but we had already made the decision to move to Seattle before Nirvana was a household name, before we even had a drummer. I think that more than anything else, we mostly wanted to move as far away from the D.C. area as we could. We didn't think we could just show up in town and suddenly become world-famous, we just wanted to play in a city where people cared about local music, and they do care in Seattle... if you're a punk band. Oops. Luckily, Seattle is a beautiful place to live, and we all fell in love with the area. The band changed its name to Stop Hitting Me and played the club circuit in the Puget Sound area for about a year before dissolving in 1994.

Following the demise of Stop Hitting Me, I focused my attentions on songwriting and playing with as many local musicians as possible. For the last several years, I have been seen performing in the Seattle area with Captain Ned Vegas and the Time Machine, I've played bass with the late Seattle "doom-goth" band Thread, played with local Top 40 band Above, and I've performed with members of Capitol Records recording artists Second Coming. I've done two projects with local Seattle singer Joey Furlan, first as a guitarist in his Joey Furlan Band, then later as the bassist in his tribute to grunge rock, which was called, shockingly, Grunge.

In March of 2001, I finally released my first solo album, Any Raw Flesh?, which got great reviews, much to my surprise. In June of 2003, I released the follow-up EP, Salve. My main focus in life at this very moment is the band I formed to play the stuff from my albums, Half Zaftig. To my extreme joy, this band has indeed gelled as a real band, and for the first time in a very long time, I feel really good about what the future may hold as far as my career playing music goes. We are playing locally in Seattle as much as we can manage. The first full-length album of new material by Half Zaftig, entitled Life Like Luster, was released on September 25, 2007.