A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF INTERSTATES
1995-2005
Track 0. Summer of 1986 – The Cardinal Crush
In March of 1986 the University of Louisville basketball team won the NCAA Championship and my dad and I didn’t like that. We were die hard Kentucky Wildcat fans so my best (and really only) friend at the time Samuel and I had to let the world know what we thought about it. Truly the first piece of music I ever created.
Track 1. Spring 1995 - Todds Point, Kentucky
The Christmas of 1994 I got my first real drum kit. Later the following year I saved up my hard earned money and bought a Korg Poly 800 from the local used music store. I would plug it into my cassette player and record different patterns I’d program into the sequencer on to a cassette. After school the one day I stopped by the new recording studio in Shelbyville and had the guy play the tape and record me playing the drums with sequences. He gave me a mix down of the drum tracks and I hooked the tape player up to the computer and recorded them into some tracking software the guy at the studio had given me for doing some work for him.
Track 2. Spring 1998 – Backstreet Studios Medley
I was now a sophomore in college and Brian Holton, the first person I ever wrote a song with, was a senior in high school and was an intern at the studio were I recorded the drum tracks on the previous song. Brian spent most of his time at the studio digitizing old records, editing recorded weddings and marching band practices but hardly recording a band. One afternoon we put together a collection of different sounds for me to take home and use in my computer songs.
Track 3. Summer 1999 – Conway to Altoona
In the Summer of 1999 we got a new, more powerful computer and it came with a demo of FL Studio and I began to compose music on the family computer. It was also in 1999 that I began to experience the freedom and excitement of roadtrips with good friends. My good friend Ricky, my brother-in-law Travis and I took a road trip to Pittsburgh, PA that summer to watch trains. Before we left I composed a set of 5 songs that I thought would capture the different feelings we might experience on the trip. This particular song was to capture the feeling I thought I might get when we would be driving down the highway at night with the cool early summer air so loud in our ears that we couldn’t talk, but simply let the music talk for us. This somewhat ambient song ended up fitting really well with the same steady tones you hear driving with the windows down. Writing songs for our roadtrips would become quite common in the next few years.
Track 4. Winter 2000 – At Home
Ricky began to get really good at playing the guitar. He would spend hours and hours a day in his room practicing. So one day I called him up and told him I was going to come pick him and his guitar up and that I was going to record him playing so I could use him as a sample. He played into a cheap computer microphone to the click track in Fruity Loops for about 30 minutes and then I began to edit the recordings into loops.
Track 5. Spring 2001 – Slide Show
I had grown tired of cutting up the same 30 minutes of recorded Ricky to make new songs with, so I started to experiment with sampling some of my favorite songs. This song features samples from an ambient project Gas.
Track 6. Spring 2001 – CR SD40-2
This song features samples of the band Helms.
Track 7. Spring 2001 – Track Four
Composed for yet another roadtrip Ricky and I would take PA. This one features samples from the American Analog Set.
Track 8. - Summer 2002 - Fabulous Prizes
I had quit going to college and started working for the railroad. Nathan McBroom had moved back to Louisville after graduating from Western Kentucky and de and I began to trade Fruity Loops files over email to work on. We also got together a few times and tried to develop a live show for our electronic compositions by adding live instrumentation. This song is from the first recording session he and I had at his church in South Louisville.
Track 9. – Spring 2003 – Coming Out Of It
Living on my own and working on call 24/7 with the railroad had caused me to fall into a middle depression. This song was written a few weeks after I started to feel better.
Track 10 – Summer 2003 – From Here To Halfdome
Jesse Eubanks invited me to come to Ear Candy studios to record some drum tracks for his new CD. He was house sitting for Eddy Morris, who owned the studio, and I agreed on one condition… that I could record one of my own songs. He agreed, and I chose this is that Nathan had composed in Fruity Loops and the year before. This song really got my brain going and gave me a vision of where I wanted to take my music.
Track 11. – Summer 2003 – Mike Killed the Huff
I was beginning to get really good at using Fruity Loops. I was living in Louisville now and my first roommate, Bryan Todd, was a guitar player. The guitar part you hear at the beginning was something he wrote that I always liked. So, I sampled him and made this.
Track 12. - Fall 2003 – Andrew in Minnesota
One of the only people that really liked my music that I knew of was my good friend Andrew Erickson. He really liked dance music. So, I started working on a 6 song dance CD and each song was to be at the same beats per minute so it would be like one big song. This is track 2 from that CD (I called ‘the arborist’) and named it for him because he had recently moved to Minnesota.
Track 13 – Winter 2003 – Strong Hands
This song was written to be played while Kyle and Brian Holton tuned during an of Asaph show. Using samples from The Never Ending Story.
Track 14 – Winter 2003 – Advent Hidden Track
Mike Cosper, the worship arts director at Sojourn Community Church, was one of the few people I would let hear my music. We had been in the studio recording a Christmas CD and he wanted to utilize different music styles on the album. The “Songs For The Advent” CD he produced ended up featuring one of my songs and a few of the other songs had samples that I had written. This was hidden track on the CD, an extended mix of the loops I put together for one of the songs.
Track 15 – Summer 2004 – Sorry I Missed the Wedding
I can’t remember who’s wedding it was I missed, but I was sick and had to miss it. So, I wrote the couple this song. At this time in my musical journey I really wanted to compose music for underground hip hop artists… it never worked out.
Track 16 – Summer 2004 – Sleep On The Couch
I was working a lot of 3rd shift at work. I wrote this song to help me take naps before work.
Track 17. – Summer – 2004 - The Day Before I Leave
Ricky was all grown up and engaged. His fiance was working at a summer camp in Colorado and so we decided to take another roadtrip. This song was written as the title suggests… the day before we left.
Track 18. – Fall 2004/Spring 2005 - Moving Right Along
My rock band of Asaph wasn’t playing out as much so I had a lot of time to work on my electronic music. I decided to self release an EP with help from the fine folks at Sunergoes Coffee in Louisville. This was the second track from that EP. A song from that EP was actually featured on NPR’s web site for “All Songs Considered”. This is when I made the switch to Apple computers and Reason software for composition.