The daughter of opera singer Carol Lockwood (who sang under the name Carol Day), Charlene studied piano and voice as a girl, but when competition time came around, she made a mark for her independence as much as for her placements — singing a capella, when all the other young vocalists were accompanied, playing her own compositions as a pre-teen, when the other pianists were providing a steady diet of "Für Elise" and "Ice Castles."

"Whose was that?" a judge asked her parents, unbelieving that Charlene’s selection was original. Her study and competition was soon expanded to include what seemed clear as her true talent, composition, and it was for composition that Charlene eventually enrolled in Shenandoah Conservatory.

But Charlene’s precocity was not limited to music. She also became a prolific reader while still very young, plowing her way through the great works of literature, Western and others, and her trips to the theatre became focused on how music and drama could complement each other to fully bring the audience into the story. At Shenandoah, Charlene studied theatre as well as music, trying to learn about all aspects of dramatic arts, makeup, shadow puppets, dramatic structure. Like the music, it was all just storytelling to her.

Charlene worked on both the east and the west coast before coming to Washington on scholarship to study at the Shakespeare Theatre. But it was working for their rival company, the Washington Shakespeare Company, that Charlene won her greatest acclaim, composing a critical celebrated score to Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo.

While clearly a descendent of Romantics like Liszt and Chopin, Charlene takes much of her inspiration from literature, and the compositions which make up her ambitious debut album, Flickering Images, are derived from some her favorites works, John Nichols' The Wizard of Loneliness, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Michael Malone's Handling Sin, Dickens, Henry James, and John Keats.

Charlene's compositions have been described as "delicate and haunting," and when coupled with her sensitive touch on the piano transports the listener into the story — a rapture the audience doesn't always want to return from.