(Image by Steven McCuen)
During the twilight of Guelph's lo-fi uprising, I found a 4 track of my own in a pawn shop where there's now a gourmet burger restaurant. The thing was about the size of a briefcase and adorned with more knobs than I knew what to do with. I never got around to doing anything public with those fumbling stabs I took at music making, but I did assemble a bunch of the pink-cheeked, wet-eared, tone deaf, imitative results to give as a gift to my first girlfriend – one instalment of which just happened to a cover of the song I would name the book I wrote about Jim Guthrie after all these years later.
Time makes fools of us all, as the saying goes.
This would have been early 2002, when I was 18. At the time I was having my mouth adjusted in preparation for getting my jaw surgically broken, and you can hear a bit of the resulting lisp on this recording. Listening to this now is about as weird as watching a 15 year old video of myself getting hurt. It's no biggie, but man it's weird to see how awkward and stupid you look from that distance and that detachment, you know?