The good-natured, dashing, and sometimes surprisingly modest son of a plasma physicist and a beautiful concert pianist, Joe was a precocious child who staged full-scale miniproductions of Homer's Odyssey on his front porch featuring neighborhood children, farm animals, and stray dogs.

When his parents relocated to Shannon in 1970, he and his sister, Delia, showed a timid interest in botany, cataloguing 37 species of noxious weeds in their grandfather's garden over the course of the summer. Eventually Joe abandoned vegetables in favor of faster food. He then attended public school where he expressed an interest in portraiture and anatomy, especially the dishy cheerleader variety.

After graduating in 1984, he left for college and sold out, chucking art for computer programming at Mississippi State University, where he shared an apartment with a succession of existentialist school pals. It was between academic studies at MSU that Joe and his friends studied billiard kinetics, distillery appreciation, Hollywood criticism, and the psychological repercussions of going 1-11 in the SEC.

In 1988 he moved to Huntsville, AL, and began writing technical, award-winning software that cost millions of dollars to develop that nobody ever used. The upgrades cost even more. Deeply troubled by this dilemma, Joe bought a new car and bargained for more vacation.

Named "coolest man alive" by People magazine in 1992, Joe, who had been linked with many celebrities including Alicia Silverstone, Neve Campbell, Sandra Bullock, Winona Ryder, Sarah Jessica Parker, and numerous models, broke hearts across America when, in February 1993, he married Celeste Wheelock. In 2002 he divorced Wheelock, with whom he has two sons, William and Tyler.

Subsequently, Joe retreated to his home studio to record tracks for a forthcoming album. Emerging from the downtown no-wave scene, he channeled numerous influences--jazz, psychedelia, blues, and Beatlesque rock, not to mention punk, funk, film music, worldbeat and hints of early-80's Norwegian psuedo-progressive glam retro metal--to create an irreverent, indie-pop auditory experience which tends to shed it's sub categorization and achieve it's own state of transcendent cool.

In July of 2004, Joe and pop diva Jodi Lasseter tied the knot. In 2006 they travelled to Guatemala and adopted a daughter, Ana Cecilia.