Early Works, Obscure Stuff
“I have a few albums which only exist to me and a few very special friends from college. They are my first albums. I might release them someday, if I can fight off the urge to ‘censor’ them.
One Sung Over is the very first full length I ever recorded in a very short period of time. It was April, 1997, and I had saved up and been helped out with the purchase of a Yamaha 4-track tape recorder. The whole concept, this idea that you could record yourself, and then layer textures and ideas was a revelation and then some to me. I would not leave the recorder and failed a couple of classes in the process.
The magic of this album was the excited reception I got from friends. This tape was photocopied at Kinko’s and sold on the sidewalk of Pacific Ave., in Santa Cruz, CA. The magic of this album was the feeling that anything was possible with music now, that you could grab a melody from the sky, lay it down, and then massage it this way and that and come out with a song. You could, for instance, put a mic under a mattress and bang on it if you didn’t have a drum kit. You could record vocals on answering machine tape. You could layer countless guitar effects. You could catch your friends out your window. All these sounds went into this album and in many ways this feeling has never left my music. The feeling of possibility. At the time I had been very very into Guided By Voices and Sonic Youth, so the tendency towards noise was at least aspired to (although, upon further listening, the songs are very straightforward…).
The opening song “It’s So Easy” was my anthem of anthems. It was about saying goodbye to my first love, to my family, to my hometown of Ukiah, California, and about saying hello to that vast and glimmering future (the one I am in now?). The sense of optimism and sadness, hope and despair, joy and anxiety, that embodies that song is still there for me, both in the song and in my sense of things. And so, it is the perfect first song off my first album.
The albums are:
One Sung Over (1996)
This (1998)
Still Dream (1999)
The Fields Were Aflame (2003)
