I will be releasing all the music I have created in my dismal life slowly over the coming weeks, exclusively on bandcamp, in order to clear out the archives and turn the material over to the world. Most of it is not pretty or even good by most measures, but every single song has had a part in my growth as a human being and for that alone I feel they deserve at least the opportunity to be heard and dissected.

this collection combines two outtakes from the first sessions for 'I Gave You the Moon But You Wanted the Stars' with some home demos that followed those sessions (and ultimately would be songs that made the record after the second sessions) and some odd songs that maybe would've made the cut in another life.

especially of note here are the numerous iterations of both 'anywhere but here' and 'au claire de la lune' - listening back now some 7 years later, it's really neat to hear how the songs progressed, especially 'au claire de la lune'.

in my memory, that song came together quickly, but especially with the first draft version vs. the 2014 Demo, you can hear how the song really evolved (albeit rather quickly, those versions couldn't have been more than a few weeks apart). those recordings would mark really the first time, other than with 'diet coke', that i brought my own session files into a studio and we built upon them. i would use my experience there for the next record, 'music for a motion picture', to come in with basically fully formed songs and sounds, needing really just to rerecord more polished instrumentation around the ambience i'd built in my basement.

a big struggle with the first sessions for IGYTM was trying to both rerecord the instrumentation and recapture the energy of that basement experimentation - and what's cool about the "outtake" tracks you see here ('casting stones' and 'fragile') is that those saw that treatment in reverse; what you hear here is the result of our studio recordings being remixed and added to by me in the basement after the fact. so 'casting stones' is a little bit bigger than what we left the studio with, and 'fragile' has some added strings and such that we didn't necessarily have time to add in studio. still, both songs likely wouldn't have made the cut, but it's tough to say - i tossed about half the record after the first sessions in favor of other songs like 'things fall apart', 'au claire de la lune', and 'anywhere but here' that i'd written and demo'd in the couple of months between the two sessions.

this collection was tough to put together, seeing as so many of the songs i'd recorded at home during this time would end up on the first iteration of 'where the dead pause' or the first pass of 'i gave you the moon'. but this collection is a neat cross section of the behind the scenes of both of those periods, and what isn't here will appear elsewhere.