It has been a harrowing week, dear reader. I’ve spent every available spare moment working through my collection of 4-track master tapes. I have now finished this gargantuan task and have collated 9 hours of music, totalling 118 tracks. Some of these are complete songs, some of these are unfinished pieces, some are just fragments.
It was hard work. Various versions of the same song, badly recorded bits, awful playing, improvisations that were borderline attacks in noise terror – I had to sit through it all in order to transfer this archive.
Again, it made me realise how I’d documented my musical development. So it was a useful exercise in that way, but it was quite depressing. I don’t like looking back too often, I’m one of those folks who finds it hard looking through old photographs because I find it painful.
However, it wasn’t all bad because I found a couple of tracks that were good and I’d completely forgotten about. The thing about music (if you are prolific) is that sometimes you completely forget you’ve recorded a track and so it is a genuine pleasant surprise to find something in the audio rubble. It is almost like someone else has recorded the song, but you hear flashes of yourself, your style, etc. So that makes it familiar, but it is still a stranger.
I’ve made a long podcast detailing some of the more acceptable tracks – it is 1’30” in length so it is a long one but you get to hear me talking about stuff like mandolins, being hit by a car and other tales that inspired the songs, etc. Hey, it might even make you laugh (probably for all the wrong reasons).
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Of course, you can also get this directly off my podcast feed.