these opinions may be jarring to people following this space that thought they knew all about me, but all i can say is that they weren't listening to what i said and actually presented and actually posted. while i grew up listening to and self-identify as a punk, and there was a brief period of art-school emo after 2007-ish (that included defeater, touche amore & la dispute, primarily) that i was able to get into starting around 2010-ish, i've been starkly critical of emo for decades and wasn't remotely interested in it at the time, at all. and, i keep posting links to abstract electronic artists like son lux, not to contemporary rock music, if it even still exists at all. if you thought i was some kind of emo rock star, that's your opinion of me forced down upon me, and not something i ever projected or ever embraced.
and, it's frustrating because i know that this is what jon and sean both thought of me, too - and that they were both apparently disappointed to find out it wasn't true, in the end. i don't take responsibility for that perception, and i don't apologize for their disappointment - it was their own delusion, and they're the ones that ended up missing out. we could have produced interesting art rock, but they didn't want to - they wanted to be boring old, normal-ass, generic-as-fuck rock stars.
that said, insofar as acoustic demos are concerned, i happen to think this is pretty good, my own obvious biases around it's production aside. if there was more emo in the period that was written with this kind of detail and performed with this kind of passion, perhaps i would have been less critical of it. and, my dismissive attitude around it aside, i would have been happy to be a part of this - if it were realistic to perform something like this and maintain the attention span of the audience that gravitates towards it. in truth, a demo like this, and a performance that emulates it, would have been instantly requested to tighten up, and i would have no doubt gotten up and walked off.
nonetheless, as an alternative demo, i can accept this - and i created it for the reason that it is a better historical document, in some sense, of what was being envisioned by the other half of the project. this is being narrated entirely from my perspective, but i have somewhat of a responsibility to get the other person's perspectives across, as well....as best as i can reconstruct them, in as honest a way as i can. if the rabit demo is a unilateral decision that i know sean dissented on, perhaps he'd be more approving of this.
as mentioned previously, sean soon emerges as a sort of generic indie rock loser trying to emulate pretentious nonsense like the animal collective, and in the process ended up copying a lot of the techniques that i developed in these demos and then claiming he invented it himself. i've even heard rumours that he tried to take credit for some of the performances and compositions, particularly when presenting the recordings to females he had an interest in, but i never confronted him about that and do not know the actual truth of it (it would be sort of pathetic, if true). so, i suppose he saw the value in these recordings after all - and decided he could do this without me. my analysis of the the little bit that i've heard of the recording he did without me is that his arrogance was unfortunately rather blinding, and that it's not as good as he seemed to think it was, in fact that it even sounded like what it actually was (a total musical illiterate fucking around with gear he didn't remotely understand), but i haven't heard anything he did after he got over what was an understandably steep learning curve, given that he had absolutely no technical or musical training at all, if he ever even did get over the curve, if he didn't just give up, instead. sean's vocals do not appear on any further recordings.
i actually played bass for jon a second time in a project he joined as a second guitarist, and i'l talk a little about that in my period 3 run through, in time - that part of the story doesn't end here.
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something like this would have been the demo brought along on an acoustic tour that never happened. tracks 1-4 would have represented a live set over the summer of 2002, while tracks five and six are otherwise stranded acoustic demos (and may have been played as encores, where possible). the style could be broadly categorized as folk punk, but it also leans heavily towards the emo of the period.
written and recorded over 2001 and 2002. mildly remixed in november, 2014 to make the tracks more presentable; nothing substantial was altered, and no new sound was recorded. released on november 19, 2014. re-released on physical media and finalized on nov 14, 2017. as always, please use headphones.
this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2002, 2014, 2017).
released august 1, 2002
j - acoustic guitar, voice (3)
sean - vocals, lyrics