I self-produced this album on a borrowed 8-track recorder in the attic of my friend Andrea's house, which I was renting for $100 a month, in the winter of 2005/2006 in downtown Peterborough, ON. I had just moved back to Ontario after half a year spent in relative isolation on a remote gulf island on Canada's west coast, where I had moved after high school. My time on Hornby Island was the first time in my musical life without a piano ('a great ivory famine', as it were), and I taught myself how to play guitar. I also composed a concept album, and wrote a short novel, both of which have been lost to the sands of time and obsolete technology.

I borrowed an 8-track from my neighbour, and played mostly every instrument on these songs, which I mostly wrote as I recorded them. While I did eventually borrow a digital piano for the twenty-second ‘Untitled” track, I mostly remained true to my vision of learning new instruments and technology, and picked up some bass, banjo, and drumming skills while recording this. I believe it can also be isolated as the epoch in which I became an accordion player; an instrument that has really defined and shaped my career ever since. I can’t remember who lent me the accordion that appears on this, but thank you! Andrea’s 11 year old son, Erik, played the killer guitar solo on ‘Starstruck’ (Erik, of course, is now an amazing adult musician, and a friend who I still see on the road sometimes) . At a few points, you can hear actual squirrells actually running around in the roof of the attic, which, of course, delighted me. Working in auto-didactic ignorance, with zero recording experience or knowledge, at times I was mixing a track with a single tambourine part against another track with the other twenty instruments bounced to it. When I asked an engineer friend to master the recording, he offered to do so for free, but on the condition that his name not be included in the credits (he still remains a friend and I concede he negotiated fairly at the time).

Track 5, “Duty Free”, is a cover of a Vic Chesnutt song. I had become an obsessive fan of Vic’s work towards the end of highschool, after discovering a Smashing Pumpkin’s cover of his song ‘Sad Peter Pan’ on Napster. While living on Hornby Island prior to recording this work, I had only about twenty CD’s in a CD wallet to listen to through a DVD player and TV speakers in the cabin that I rented. About a third of them were Vic Chesnutt albums, including ‘The Salesman and Bernadette’, his incredible collaboration with Lambchop, which ‘Duty Free’ begins as the first track. Formative as this time in remote isolation was, and having the same twenty albums as a soundtrack, Vic’s approach to writing, composition, collaboration, and humour really shaped my approach to my own work, and continues to to this day. I remember distinctly, while recording the vocals for this cover, not feeling comfortable attempting to affect Vic’s beautiful Georgian drawl, but knowing that I needed to produce a distinction, so I ran to the bar across the street and drank half a dozen pints and came back, singing the vocals in one take and screwing up the final word. I do not have the rights to this song.The refrain in 'Deadline' is also lifted directly from another Vic Chesnutt song of the same name from his tremendous record 'Left To His Own Devices', the spirit of which I hope found some life in this project of mine. RIP Vic.

The cover art was an image that I literally cut and pasted from a show poster for a local punk band - I can’t remember who (Wine with Everything? The Diplomats?) At the time, the liner notes were typed out on a typewriter. I made about 100 CD-R’s, which I mostly sold out of my accordion case while I busked in front of a pawn shop that once paid me $20 to stop busking on my accordion in front of their pawn shop, and some copies eventually made it into the hands of some older musicians who eventually asked me to join their real bands and thus, essentially, began my career. I hadn’t listened to this work for over a decade, until I was asked to do an interview about my early recorded work. I asked the internet for a copy, and Trent Radio and Radio Free Peterborough sent me one from their archives (many thanks to Jill Staveley).

Tracks 1 and 3 feature some digital distortion that wasn’t present on the original recordings and that I can’t eliminate and I apologize. All of the other quality issues are entirely my doing and I apologize. Thanks for listening.