LOST & FOUND DEPARTMENT
I started this over on Facebook, but finding a permanent home for my Lost Decade music on my own website is a better idea. A lot happened and a lot got lost in the years since moving from Seattle (2015), but I never lost the desire to make music. Once we bought a house in Tacoma—where we could afford to do such a thing*—I set up a humble home studio and started recording things again. The hard part was finishing anything. I abandoned one track and started another, eventually returning to tinker with old tracks until malaise or despair set in. Then I abandoned them again and started on a few new ideas to console myself. This was…problematic.
It took ten years to do something about it, but I’ll start by going back a little further to 2013, back to one of the first projects I abandoned. It had many names on my hard drive over the years: The Uncertainty Sessions; The Crackle & Pop Demos; The Sangster Six. Whatever the title, it was a brief detour in my musical life and one that never saw an official release, largely because it was never really finished.
I had known producer/musical guru/awesome guitarist Johnny Sangster for many years, and was stoked to finally work with him at his studio—Crackle & Pop—in Seattle. Johnny would produce and record my crackpot idea of "30 songs as quickly as possible” and, bless him, was highly skeptical. On the first night I recklessly endangered 10 songs on my list, singing and playing live and utilizing a kick drum for rhythm. It went poorly. Besides being rhythmically challenged, my grand idea was not the best use of time or money…so we had The Talk.
Ultimately, would it make sense to focus on a handful of songs, go spare on the production, and get them to sound really good—plus use a damn metronome? Well, that's what we did. Johnny added plenty of his own musical skills to the project and we got Aimee Zoe to come in and play drums on a couple of tracks. While only making it through six songs (plus an unfinished 7th) , I managed to have a great time, improve my rhythm, and learn plenty that would influence my home recordings in the years ahead. I never bested Johnny's rough mixes, so I simply gave them some extra sonic sauce and concocted album artwork. It shall be dubbed Demos Lost & Found: 2013 and available on Bandcamp. It also includes 10 bonus tracks of studio outtakes when you download the full album.
