William Fitzsimmons (born 1978) is an American singer-songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee. His music has appeared on ABC's Brothers & Sisters and Grey's Anatomy spin-off Private Practice, MTV's Life of Ryan and Teen Wolf, The CW's One Tree Hill, CBS's Blue Bloods, ABC Family's Greek, Lifetime's Army Wives and USA Network's Burn Notice. To date, he has released: nine studio albums, one EP, one live album, one remix album and two cover albums. Fitzsimmons is the youngest son of two blind parents and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is said to have developed his multiple instrumental skills thanks to his father and mother, both amateur musicians. The house where he grew up featured a fully functioning pipe organ, hand-built by his father. He started playing the piano and trombone during primary school and took up the guitar while in middle school. He is also skilled on the banjo, melodica, ukulele and mandolin, and is known for mixing folk music with electronics in some of his productions. He is often compared to contemporaries Iron & Wine, Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith. Fitzsimmons' musical career only came after his master's degree in counselling at the University of Geneva and after working as a mental health therapist. During a summer break, in the middle of graduate school, Fitzsimmons recorded a collection of songs at home that would later become his debut album Until When We Are Ghosts, released in 2005. Fitzsimmons' writing often includes references to personal and family themes; in fact, his 2006 second album, Goodnight, also self-produced and recorded at home, is said to have been based largely on his parents' divorce during his teenage years, and his 2008 work, The Sparrow and the Crow, his first studio recording, was written entirely about his divorce following the latter. Fitzsimmons revealed to the music programme eTown that he recorded the album with a collaborator who he later learned was having an affair with his wife while they were working on the recording and stated that this delayed the release of this work. The singer's music was initially noticed mainly thanks to MySpace and touring with colleagues Ingrid Michaelson, Brooke Fraser and Cary Brothers, among others, and thanks to several song insertions in popular TV programmes such as Grey's Anatomy.