About a year ago, in December of 2024, I knew I needed to change my approach to making music. I was longing to play with other people and get back into my local scene, so I set a (relatively) simple goal for 2025: put together a band and play a couple of gigs. To clarify, the intent of the goal was to play original music and perform in venues other than The Candy Factory, my coworking and social club, where I periodically host open mic nights and often play a song or two by myself to get the night started.
For a greater context, I started playing bass in rock bands back in 1986, nearly 40 years ago. For the next 35 years, I never went more than six months or so without pursuing either live shows with one or more bands, or significant writing and recording projects, either my own or with other artists. I was always working toward something musical. But for the past five years, that hasn’t been the case.
In November 2019, I played a show with Here Inside in the basement at Tellus360. That show also included an ambient set that I played with Daryl Snider to open the show. It was a rich evening that made me excited about the near future. Coming into 2020, Here Inside started working on a new EP with producer Jon Chinn. We planned to release it by summer, and then develop a brand new live show with the goal of playing out a bunch that fall. Well, you know… 2020.
By the end of that summer, Jon and I had finished recording the music for the Here Inside EP with plans to work on lyrics and vocals during the fall and winter. The COVID pandemic was in full swing by then, and by the end of 2020, my creative energy was burned out. Soon after, my mother’s health went into a freefall, and I spent the next few years actively participating in her care and helping my father manage these changes. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t have found time to work on a musical project; it was more that I just couldn’t get my head and heart into it. I did manage to do some work up through 2024. I did a little production for other artists. I wrote a few first drafts of new songs. I recorded some rough demos. I wrote and recorded a handful of podcast theme songs. All of those little projects were quick hits over a day or two. Nothing really stuck beyond that. My creative energy was on life support.
So, in December 2024 I decided it was time to get back to playing. But what to play? One of the benefits of that musical hiatus was that I hadn’t been thinking about the next thing, or a constant flow of new ideas. I had actually spent some time going through my back catalog of recordings. I started documenting the work and realized a couple of important things.
First, all of my work has value. From a rough demo recorded on a cassette player to published studio recordings, all of these ideas came from the same place, from inside of me. Some of the ideas are better than others. Some have been developed more than others. Some might end up being better in the future, in a different context, or under different circumstances. But regardless, they all have value, and the bad ones were critical in the journey to get to the good ones.
Second, I realized that a song I wrote when I was 19 doesn’t belong to the 50-something me. It belongs to that kid, who was living and working in a time and place that had nothing to do with a 20-something, 30-something, or 40-something me. Yet over the years, I would judge all of my past work in comparison to what I was doing in the present. Of course, I felt like some of the work was immature, or under developed, or not as good as it should have been. But that’s bullshit. It was a product of the time, the place, and the person who was creating it.
So while I was enjoying these trips down memory lane, I realized that it was time to work with some of this old music again, in the context of a band. I wanted to have some fun and play with a rock band again. I decided to pull songs from four albums I put together between 1991 and 2004 and see what I could do with them.
Soon after the new year, I met bassist Erik Teichmann from a post I put on Reddit and he enjoyed the music enough to get together and jam. He introduced me to Brent Palsgrove, a drummer that he had played with over the years and by summer we had put together eight of those songs into a nice tight set. Even though 2025 turned out to be the busiest year (personally and professionally) that I can remember (a story for another time), we managed to fit in some rehearsals, a couple of days in a studio, and an October debut at West Art, and a December showcase at Zoetropolis.
Remarkably, with a few weeks to spare, I reached that goal for 2025 that I set for myself a year ago. Looking back, it was about as close to what I had imagined as it could have been and created a really great foundation for a ton of fun in 2026.