Tiven was born and raised in Connecticut. He received his bachelor’s of arts in music in 1980 from Wesleyan University in Middletown. In 1981 he moved to Boston, and in 1983 formed Dumptruck with Kirk Swan. Mulcahy was the band’s first drummer. Dumptruck performed and recorded in Boston for eight years, often featured on college radio stations and garnering favorable reviews. In 1984 the band released D is for Dumptruck. Positively Dumptruck followed in 1986. After a year of extensive touring in support of Positively Dumptruck, Swan left the band and moved to L.A. to pursue a solo career. The following year saw the release of the band’s bestselling effort, For the Country. While touring in support of the record, a bitter legal dispute between the band and its former record label began to brew. The band would later defeat the suit, but the litigation kept Dumptruck from signing a major label deal. Dumptruck was left idling until the band eventually fell apart in 1991. That year, Tiven moved to Austin. “I got sick of winter,” he says. In Austin, Tiven and his ex-wife, violinist Amy Farris, played as a husband-wife duo. He also played in a variety of bands, including Blind Willie’s Johnson with singer/guitarist Mick Buck and Jean Caffeine’s All-Night Truckstop. In 1995, Tiven reconstituted Dumptruck from his Austin headquarters with a local lineup. The resurrected Dumptruck released three more albums. The first, Days of Fear, was originally recorded in 1991 in Boston, and was finally released in 1995 by Unclean Records.