Over the past half year or so, I have gradually come back to a point where I can think of myself as a composer/songwriter again and not feel like I'm stretching the definition. What I'm sort of realizing now is that I have some nagging past issues regarding my music that need attention. Namely, I have numerous songs from my past that have never been recorded properly, sitting around as four-track cassette demos. I'm realizing I need to do something about this.

It's not that I don't have good ideas for new work coming to me. I do. Lots of good ideas. It's just that I know that if I don't go back and record some of my old stuff, it will haunt me forever. I will constantly be referencing old songs to the three or four people who have heard them without ever being able to show a fully realized version of any of them to anyone new. So I've resolved to make a secondary project (behind Very Us Artists) out of this. Over the next year or so (give or take a few months), I'm going to try to record my old songs again. Some will need some minor rewrites. I can't possibly sing the lyrics to some of my old stuff without either cracking up or cringing, and some of my transitions needed some polishing. But I will avoid any total overhauls.

With this in mind, I pulled out all my old cassettes last night. I have some interesting stuff on cassette, like 23-year-old recordings of me as a kid trying to do robot voices through a harmonica. Yes, I was an odd duck. I also found that I have 18 cassettes on which there is at least some 4-track material, and many of them are pretty much full. I have another 14 cassettes that contain mixdowns. The mixdowns are easy enough to go through, but the 4-track tapes are a nightmare. I no longer have a 4-track cassette recorder, and these recordings were done at high speed, so everything sounds very, very slow, and since they are 4-track recordings, two of the tracks play backwards on a regular cassette player. This makes it very difficult to figure out what I am listening to. Oh, and my only cassette player is this old Sony Sport Walkman, which plays everything back at a slightly higher speed than it should (it's kind of annoying).

Anyway, the idea is that I want to listen back through some old stuff and try to pick out any gems. I've found most of what I've been looking for, I think, although there is at least one song that I'm really trying to find but can't.

It should be interesting to re-interpret my old work with my more age-weathered mind. I can't wait to see what I end up doing.