I’ve put out a call to my old college friends: send me the mp3s of my music that you have sitting around. Over the years, I’ve lost any number of older recordings to hard drive crashes and plain jackassed disorganization, and I find myself now in a introspective, retroflective sort of mood. And so I’ve started pulling in some of the yield, including my first demo tape, a collection of songs recorded in late summer 1997 shortly before I left for my freshman year at WPI.

And oh. my. god.

Some of it is pure 17-year-old angst-monkey super-pretentious proto-folky dreck. Just plain bad. Questionable artistic decisions is what I’m talking about.

And then some of it is not so bad. Nice melodies. Cool arrangment ideas. Some good lyrical ideas here and there, even if many of the songs are just very, very contrived and inconsistent.

It’s food for thought. I’m fixin’ to put together as complete an archive of my music as I can manage. Annotated lyrics full of footnotes and hyperlinks, perhaps.