Back my freshman year of college, I had several friends that were really good musicians.  I am a drummer, but that’s a pretty hard instrument to play in a dorm room, so my friends who played way more portable instruments got way more of a chance to practice than I.

Jordan was one of the best guitarists I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with.  Al was a fantastic singer and a pretty good bassist, if he could remember the song that we were playing.  Lucy played a mean viola and could belt it out.  Joe is the best singer I’ve ever worked with, and a hell of a pianist and guitarist now as well.

What I had though was some recording equipment and some ancient software for multitracking and editing and such.  This lead to some rather bizarre creations and some pretty good ones.  I burned all of these songs on CD’s (yeah, I know, right?) and every time I got a new computer I moved the files along for the ride.

Sadly, eventually all the CD’s were lost/scratched and the data failed to make a move or two, and I thought I had lost it all.  Today, I was digging through some old boxes and guess what I found.

It’s not the entire collection, but I was able to recover a couple tracks from a CD today.   For your listening pleasure, I have uploaded two songs, one is normal and one is bizarre.

This is the normal one, and it was just us goofing around trying to get levels on everything right, but it turned out pretty good and now it’s stuck in my head so it has to go up:

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Yeah, and now it’s in your head too.  Jordan played guitar, and Al and Lucy sang.

And now into a song that I don’t even think can be explained but I’ll try.

One day, I showed Jordan how to hook up his guitar and record tracks on the computer.  He had a couple things that he wanted to record and this was the easiest way of doing it.  I left for class, and when I came back, he had figured out the multitracking and layered about a half-dozen guitar parts on top of each other.  I borrowed a floormate’s djembe and banged out a drum line.

We thought this was hilarious, but we needed to get some lyrics.

Al comes into the room, and it is quickly determined that he should sing something.   Rather than create our own lyrics, we decide that he should simply read from books in a very broken and disjointed way.  We pressed record, he grabbed some books of the shelf and started reading whatever page he opened up to.  He starts off with a little Great Gatsby, which leads into David Lettermen’s Top Ten Lists, and ends with A Brave New World.

This song never really had a name, but it always made us laugh.  Granted, we were usually drunk when we would start listening to this, but the point still stands.

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As I recover more of these songs and clean them up, hopefully I can find other gems like this.  And by gem, of course I mean cubic zirconia.