When I returned to Texas in 2000, I spent some time writing and recording music using equipment I’d purchased in ’96 or ’97: a couple of Shure omnidirectional mics, an M-Audio Omni I/O & Delta 66 combo, and whatever instruments I had available at the time, using an old version of Cakewalk for which I had some digital effects packages. At that time (my recollection isn’t clear, this was all sometime between ’00 and ’03), I found a songwriter’s forum mostly frequented by electronica and hip-hop folks hosted at deadmurder.com, where you could post songs and other users could review them. This was in the heyday of the OLGA, Harmony Central, altcountrytab.com, and other tabbers’ sites (shout out to Chuck Taggart’s amazing Uncle Tupelo lyrics and tabs), so I’d occasionally post tabs for songs, too. Anyhow, deadmurder used a bunch of wacky php scripting that changed pretty frequently, then underwent major changes and a shift to the wire.fm domain name, and one downside of all the fancy scripting was that the Wayback Machine didn’t index the site in a way that I can see any of my old content.
Occasionally, I’ll be going through a box or random stack of CDs and come across some of the stuff from those days, and I’ve probably got multiple copies of mp3s ripped from CDs I burned at one time or another. None of it was particularly good quality, but I opened a SoundCloud account and posted some of it there, as well as transcribed the lyrics I wrote to the best of my recollection at github.com. Many of the recordings were made early on in the songwriting process, which accounts for the difference between the recorded lyrics and those I put up on github.
For a while, I played with a group of folks in Olympia, WA under the name Popoko Darling, and I may post some of the tracks I’ve got from what we recorded, although my contribution wasn’t in the writing of the thing, at best I improvised the part I played to complement the lyrics and written guitar part. Still, I had a lot of fun playing different instruments (guitar, bass, accordion, keyboard, ARP synth, resin key vibraphone, and probably something else), and I like Rick’s songs.
Welp, I’ve been composing this post on my phone after the morning diaper change and it’s time to get going to work. I just wanted to get these thoughts out there since much of this stuff has suffered bit rot or otherwise been lost to the sands of time.
sdmouton dot wordpress 