Mark Hagerling’s upbringing was a bit unusual. He jokes that he spent the first two years of his life forced to crawl around on the floor of his parents house hemmed in by the two ominous stereo speakers on either end and incessantly bombarded with the sounds of his Mother’s large orchestral record collection. His mother was a music teacher, his father, an artist and an opera singer and they lived close to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Though he never attended a conservatory full-time himself, he studied with a number of private teachers around Oberlin concentrating on piano, oboe, trombone and musical theory.

As a teen he became involved in  popular music and, at the age of 16, was signed as a recording artist through Terry Knight, the producer of the popular rock group, Grand Funk Railroad.  Paul McCartney, of the Beatles, once commented about one of Mark’s songs, "Sounds like something I would have written".