Making recordings has been at the core of making music from the moment I started learning how to play as a kid. I started learning how to play drums and guitar at about the same time and I wanted to learn songs, write my own songs, play in a band and make records. I wanted to get better at these things and also create a body of work. Recording myself has been vital to getting better at these things. Recording also provided a context and a motive for everything I wanted to do. I don't think I was going to be writing scores.

I started with cassette tapes on a tape recorder, and then I graduated to a 4 track. I used that 4 track for years before I finally got a digital 16 track recorder, and then much later, finally a computer. I don't think I would have progressed nearly as much as I think I have as a musician if I wasn't recording myself along the way. To hear what I actually sounded like was the best motivator to try to improve. It took a long time before I stopped cringing, but at the same time I was pretending I was really making records and I was free to explore anything I wanted since no one else had to hear what I was doing. I was dreaming of being like my musical heroes, with large and varied bodies of work.

It took a really long time to become at all confident in my skills as a musician or as a songwriter, but I learned along the way that making recordings was a pursuit unto itself and I was also getting better at that. I encourage any musician at any level to learn recording engineering and production, especially now when we have platforms like bandcamp to share anything we want to, any work we do without limit.

Of course, this is all still ongoing and I feel like I'm essentially doing now what I started doing as a kid, which is explore and learn whatever I want to, get better at it, and do it for it's own sake.

This upload is part of a series of selected 4 track tapes recorded around 20 years ago and digitized some time ago and finally mixed in April 2020.

Volume 1 is tape #149 (all of the tapes, of with there are around 500, are labelled Paul's Songs, so this one is Paul's Songs #149) recorded in the basement of 1253 Davenport Road (by Westmoreland) in Toronto on Thursday, January 13th, 2000. It's the two guitar, bass, and drums format and one of the guitars (a white Yamaha RGX - my brother's first electric) had three strings - E, A, and B. Each song came from that. The B string broke at the end of Passive Existence, so just the E and A strings from then on.