I wanted to write about this album before I show it to the world, because it’s a tricky little thing. Five years ago, during the summer after my freshman year of college, I hunkered down in the room I was staying in at my sister’s apartment while she and her husband were at work and put together a really nicely polished, home recorded album. I was really proud of that and I still show it to people, but it doesn’t really reflect much relevant.

After that, I started writing a little less, but the songs I wrote were what I felt were some of my best. I got to play a lot of them at a gig I did at a coffee shop, and people liked them! I began to plan another CD and completed nice recordings of a few of the songs, but it was a slow process.

Then, before I transferred to SSU, I started taking antidepressants. My writing almost came to a halt completely. I don’t know what has done that. Is it the medicine? Is it my smaller amount of misery making it hard to write sad songs? Or is the bits of depression that still creep in and make me want to do nothing? I don’t know. And now, I feel like the creativity has drained out of me, and if I touch the songs I wrote back when I was good, I’ll just ruin them. I have written a few new songs, but only a few. And as far as rerecording the old songs, my laptop has started failing and my microphone gives me feedback in the practice rooms at SSU, so….

I have had a lot of excuses.

And now I have almost five years of perfectly decent songs which have been living, homeless, on my Soundcloud with no one to formally care about them. I have decided it’s time to let them live somewhere, as they are, without having to push myself to do something else. I have picked the songs which were already passably recorded and ready for ears to listen to. The interesting thing is that they span this whole, huge period in which I lived my college experience. I thought I would lay out the timeline a little, in case anyone cares.

For starters, there are two songs I wrote quite a while ago which I liked enough to tidy up before things slowed down. “The Price” was actually on my very first CD, which I sold to my fellow high school classmates. It was written about frustrating family situations I was in at the time, and I still think it’s a good song, but I hadn’t arranged it all. I really like the bass notes I have added to it to give it some dimension, plus my much better singing.

“Tomorrow” was written around the same time I wrote all of the songs for “Things We Like” but it wasn’t ready to be done with yet. I still like it because it is a song about depression days before I knew I could call them depression days. I was incredibly frustrated with myself for missing school, rehearsal, for not being able to move out of my bed. I didn’t know why I was being such a piece of crap, so I decided to just write a song apologizing for it. I still feel like apologizing some days.

“My Red Hat” was also written while I was at NDNU, and has been performed and shared before so you may have already listened to it. At NDNU, I actually wrote a violin and flute part for it and the arrangement turned out really beautifully. I had ambitious ideas about home recording it with the instrumentalists, but that sadly never happened, so I finished arranging it myself with the uke.

“Forgotten How” was also written at the tail end of my time at NDNU, as I started a new relationship and found myself feeling jaded. I had previously been in a relationship which was the “live and die for each other” brand of romantic, and something I now felt too old and wise for.

Now, I’ve left NDNU and am back in Sacramento for a year, feeling like a lonely failure. I wrote “By the Sea” about missing my life in the bay area with my friends and the community I had built. I also wrote “The Tide” around this time, as that same relationship became something I had fallen into much deeper than I had ever intended when I wrote the first song.

Further into this terrible year in Sacramento, I wrote “Hearthfire” a title I think I accidentally stole from the Skyrim DLC without really thinking about it. I felt so displaced. I went from dorm to dorm to guest bedroom and to more dorms, and I never had a room to go back to at my parents’ house or anything. I felt like I was living in my boxes of things.

Then the horrible year ended! And I transferred, and I started taking medication, and life was better. But my sister and best friend in the world moved to Texas, and that was rough, so I wrote “Remember That?” I honestly forgot about this song and dug it up while compiling this album, but I think it’s a good song, so you get to listen to it. We’re okay now. It just sucks sometimes.

Since then, I’ve only written two songs I think are worthy of inclusion here. It feels sad and a little frustrating, but I hope you can hear today’s voice in them a little bit. “This Body” is another song about depression. You could call it the matured version of “Tomorrow.” And “I Could Fall in Love With You” has described a variety of relationships in the last year in which I fall for people who have very little interest in me. I’m a CHUMP, I tell you!

Finally, I included a cover I did of a song by The Smiths, because I really like it. I hope you do too.

So, there you have it. 2011-2017 is a long period for a short little CD no one will listen to. I hope you consider it, and enjoy peeking into my brain. These songs are all deeply personal and mostly sad, and I hope you can feel sad with me.