busted raze nineteen years ago he was hanging out with his girlfriend in a city park when some cops who were canvassing the area saw them, got suspicious of the two teenagers who looked like they walked straight out of the woodstock film, and started asking questions. they found some roaches and a small amount of pot on him. he found himself in a police car, convinced he was going to jail for only having enough pot in his pocket to roll one joint. he was sixteen. he might have been too terrified to speak, but she was friendly with the cops. she talked to them. told them her boyfriend was a musician. told them he was making all this crazy music with his friend. told them she just happened to have their new CD with her. did they want to see it? they looked at our song titles and my crude drawings of us mooning the world and thought it was pretty cool. they warmed up to him. they let him off with a warning: keep your drugs at home. with its songs about kinky animals who refuse to die, lycra-clad frogs who are surprisingly skilled chefs, the perks of ending up in hell, a perverted dentist who gets his comeuppance, a secret society made up of people hellbent of self-annihilation, and the effects of an absence of cable TV on a teenage male libido, it has to be one of the most depraved and twisted collections of music i've ever scraped together, even all these years later. talk about a strange album to save someone's ass. 180926 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Oh! This really happened to you? I was reading and I thought, "Huh, he used 'I' in one spot, that might be because it's about him - but no, that's probably just a narrative device" but then there was the ending. It's a great story! Now I'm curious to hear the album. If you still have the song recordings or files, I'd be interested in hearing them. (And sorry for taking too long to answer your last email, I was disorganized and then preoccupied with another person's crisis and then had a cold. By way of excuses.) 180926 ... raze i used "of" where i should have used "on"! and i didn't catch it! noooooooo! anyway. this actually happened to gord. he didn't tell me until a few years after, but i thought it was hilarious that the most out-there album we ever made together was the one his high school girlfriend used to endear him to the police. it's a good thing they didn't pop it in the car stereo! that might have undid all the good will in a hurry. that memory came floating back to me because i just got the album remastered. i tend to master my own stuff these days after a few not-great experiences with professional mastering engineers, but this one was recorded when i didn't really know what i was doing with digital recording at all. there were some serious issues i didn't think i could fix myself. it didn't help that i wasn't wise enough to back up the songs in any form that would allow me to remix them. i always wondered what a good mastering engineer might be able to do with this stuff — if they could clear away some of the mud and make it more listenable. it's a bit of an odd thing to have on your bucket list, because it's just some crazy album i made when i was sixteen and sleep-deprived, and it wouldn't appeal to a lot of people. but i'm happy to say i found the right mastering engineer and he did a pretty great job. he kept the funkiness of the original recording intact, but made it much more pleasant to listen to. i'm happy to share. be warned, though ... teenage me was violently against the idea of making radio-friendly music. there was one guy i went to high school with (i hesitate to call him a friend) who was also a songwriter. when he found out i had a little home studio setup he insinuated himself in my life as a "collaborator". most of the time that amounted to him getting free recording time and a free session musician, and my music was more of an afterthought. when we did write together it was always me contributing to one of his songs. he was all about trying to write things they'd play on mainstream radio and aping what was popular to fit in. i think i almost gave him a nervous breakdown with my steadfast refusal to make "normal" music people could relate to. he got angry about how i was "throwing [my] talent away". it was pretty funny. he kept trying to get me to write sappy love songs. i kept trying to get him to loosen up and have some fun. neither one of us came out on the winning end of that one. 180927 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Ah, I see. So the "our" and "my" in there is because of the shared music. My tired mind isn't the best reading-comprehender at times. I think it'd be fun. If it's swearing and naughty language you're worried about, I can keep it away from disapproving ears. (E.g. my brother the socialist will not watch Monty Python's Holy Grail because he thinks it's too rude and thus "disrespects" the legend. Also, if I find any disembodied ears floating around that seem to disapprove, I'll steer clear.) If it's musical weirdness, I don't tend to disapprove either! Never mind that my songs tend to be all I-vi-IV-V and stuff. 180928 ... e_o_i Oh, and I meant to say, congratulations on getting the remastering done. That sounds like a cool project. It's like me retyping old notebooks, but less boring. 180928 ... e_o_i ...typing up, not retyping. 180928 what's it to you? who go blather from