UPDATE AUGUST 2008

Up until late 2006, I was a hardcore 4-tracker; I stubbornly recorded all of my songs onto an old-school 4-track cassette machine, well after Pro Tools and other digital recording options became available and even affordable to regular people at home. Perhaps I am a luddite at heart. But I do know that the severe limitations and beautiful simplicity of 4-track recording forced a certain resourcefulness out of me that I was reluctant to sacrifice.

Of course, once I jumped into digital recording with both feet, I realized that it was just another tool, like the 4-track, and that, ultimately, the quality of your ideas is what counts in the end. Unlimited tracks, pitch-correction plug-ins and quantizing software aren't going to make bad ideas good. By the same token, a lo-fidelity recording can't stop a great idea.

Which is what this website is about. I truly love my crusty old 4-track tapes; they contain the bulk of my songwriting output (since about 1995), and aside from that, they have a certain scrappy charm. Yet I probably would have just let the tapes moulder away into dust, without anyone (but me) having heard them -- but my good friend Dan Karkos had a much better idea.

Dan proposed that we convert these songs to digital files and store them on a website that could be perused by the public. He even offered to design the site and do all the technological heavy lifting himself. How could I say no?

So we decided to do the site. The next step was for me to go through my piles of cassettes and pick the songs I'd like to put up; I came up with a list of about 150 to start with. But the more I combed through the tapes, the more songs I found hiding in the shadows. Songs that I'd forgotten about for years, that suddenly jumped out and screamed, "hey, remember me???" Ultimately we wound up putting around 300 songs on this site.

We broke this extremely bulky song list down into year-by-year archives. As you will see, some years saw more prolific output than others. That said, this website is by no means a complete archive -- I've made many, many other recordings that I decided to leave off, for one reason or another. But who knows, maybe some of them will leap out at me at a later date?

Making these songs available for public consumption is really fun and exciting, but I sort of feel like I put a really embarrassing letter in the mail and can't get it back. Believe me, none of this stuff was recorded with the intention of any kind of official release; there's plenty of out-of-tune singing, loose playing, sloppy recording, and not-quite-fully-baked ideas. When I write a song, I record it as I'm writing it, which means that most of the parts are being sung or played for the first time as the tape is rolling -- the stuff hasn't been rehearsed, tweaked or fine-tuned at all. The object is to get the idea down before it evaporates.

These demos could obviously be re-recorded with more polished playing, tighter singing, fuller production, etc. And some have, of course -- early demo versions of many songs that later got recorded "properly" for pOp*stAr*kiDs and BLACK SUGAR TRANSMISSION (my two main band projects) are here, in all their gawky innocence.

But honestly I like most of these recordings the way they are. There are sounds on some of these demos that I could never re-create -- and lordy knows, you can never reproduce the sound of fresh inspiration, right?

andeee*

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