This album is a collection of demos, covers, and unreleased material of mine spanning from July 2011 to June 2014. The various places, times, and people with whom I've written and recorded these songs act as a sort of emotional map guiding me through my experiences over the last three years of my life, and to me this album is the fruition of that. My obsessive documentation of all things musical due to my increasingly poor memory helped, too. Most of these songs were eventually or soon will used in various bands that I've been a part of. I'll break them up in to groups by timeline.

"Arson" and "Night I" were written in Bucharest, Romania during the summer of 2011. I was there with two of my bandmates from Gentleman's Favourite (Eddie Maurer & Teddy Razvan Stanescu), and in the upstairs bedroom of our bassist's house we wrote and recorded acoustic demos of the songs that would eventually make up our first and only EP, "Distance." An absurd amalgam of things have occurred since then that have prevented that EP from being released long after the band broke up to go to college, but it should finally come out by the end of this summer. "Arson" will be on it in full band, electric form. "Night I" only exists in this demo. We recorded on a shitty laptop through Audacity.

"Euthanasia" was recorded in a Hughsonville studio by Josh Rapala during the August 2012 recording sessions when Gentleman's Favourite recorded the "Distance" EP. He later picked up a drug habit and refused to give us our recordings unless we paid him an inordinate amount, so it took us a almost a year to get this one back, thus why the EP still hasn't come out. When it's released this recording will be on it, albeit probably mixed differently. This song was written in the studio during those sessions explicitly for the purpose of going on the EP, the only song on it that wasn't written in Romania.

"Squid Understanding" was written and this demo recorded in November of 2013 inside the Indie Love Cave aka when Devyn turned her SUNY Potsdam dorm room's beds into a massive blanket fort for a week. It was one of the first songs we wrote for our band josie & THE NEVERENDING SADNESS, and the full band version will be on our first EP. I recorded this on my phone immediately after we finished writing it.

"Amputeenager" and "Palmistry" were each written in about an hour over the course of the first two months of 2014 in the common room of the suite at Potsdam I lived in all last year. I recorded these demos on my phone immediately after completing the songs. Since then, they have been turned into full band songs for josie & THE NEVERENDING SADNESS, and "Amputeenager" will appear on our first EP. "The Shower Song" was written around the same time and under the same circumstances, but was then recorded and mixed by Mike Bruns the following March. He and I had previously collaborated on it, adding acoustic guitar. abbyeyesore (Abby Cowan) wrote and added her harmonies during the recording process. It was recorded in a Crane rehearsal room on Mike's rig. It's likely going to be re-recorded for the upcoming Ghost Dads full-length. which is slated to come out by the end of the summer.

"Notes for 2:30" was written following an extensive and intense several hour long conversation shared between Mike Bruns (Boy Goliath) and I late one night in April of 2014. He went home and immediately wrote the first verse, recorded it, and sent it to me the next morning asking if I wanted to help him write the rest. We met up the next day in my suite's common room and I wrote the remainder, in addition to adding banjo. As soon as we finished writing I recorded this on my phone. It will likely be turned into a josie & THE NEVERENDING SADNESS song.

"First Saturday Ives Park" was based around a guitar part I had written the preceding fall and had never been able to do anything with. I finally pulled it together and wrote the first verse one night in my suite's common room in May 2014. I wrote the second verse in my head while walking around campus in Potsdam and getting lunch with Izzy Payero-Cabral (my belated apologies for being distracted!). The final section was written during a josie & THE NEVERENDING SADNESS recording session at Devyn's Potsdam apartment. I recorded this demo on my phone the following day. This, along with ""I am."" will appear in a more fleshed out form on Ghost Dads' full-length.

""I am."" was written in June 2014 in my bedroom in New Hamburg, NY, in the dark, while my dad's band practiced downstairs. I recorded this demo on my phone immediately following the completion of the song.

The covers were recorded randomly whenever I was feeling inspired/productive/bored. I recorded "Pastoral" in August of 2012 in my bedroom with Garageband on my Macbook. "Radio War" was recorded with Audacity on a Mac during the summer of 2013 at my home in New Hamburg. "papa ed's out of body experience" was recorded with abbyeyesore in a Crane practice room on a rainy day in October 2013 for the purposes of submission to something or other that we never wound up doing. "CENTER" was recorded on Garageband on my phone in the middle of the night in my kitchen in May of 2014 while my mom slept in the other room.

Anyway, I'd firstly like to thank everyone in the bands these songs went/are going to. That's Eddie Maurer, Teddy Razvan Stanescu, and Juan Espinosa from Gentleman's Favourite, Eddie (again) from Ghost Dads, and Devyn Halter, Izzy Payero-Cabral, Sam Lasky, Mike Bruns, Zach Sandecki, and Bobby Rosato from josie & THE NEVERENDING SADNESS. Thanks as well to Abby Cowan aka abbyeyesore for everything, and to Mike Bruns aka Boy Goliath again for knowing how to mix and record beautifully, a skill I lack miserably, as evidenced by the eminently lo-fi nature of this album. It amazes me that there is such an intense concentration of astonishing musical talent among my friends, and I'm going to post links to all of these peoples' music at the bottom. Thanks to the bands whose songs I covered for being dope. As always, my sincerest apologies to all of the people I wrote songs about. I know how weird that is, and I'm sure you all know exactly who you are, which must be weird, too. Thanks to everyone who tolerates or even enjoys my music, and particularly those who put up with the noise I make at weird hours of the night when I'm writing and recording stuff.