The Recordings I Once Thought Lost

A little over a decade ago I was a motivated and wide eyed teenager full of ideas and potential.

Wait, no. Let me rephrase that. I was a teenager with wide, dilated pupils, full of what I thought were good ideas, and pot. I was full of pot. Nah, I'm joking. I never touched the devil's lettuce. Scout's on her, or whatever. Is that how y- never mind.

Jokes aside, I made the transition from playing primarily electric instruments to the acoustic guitar. The change in tone really inspired my playing and I churned out two EPs worth of content within a year using a webcam microphone, originally, and then a rudimentary audio interface and some guitar plug-ins. What resulted was... actually not terrible.

Well, at least that's what I was told then. I had since lost the majority of the recordings aside from what had been posted on a Youtube account (that I no longer have access to - remember, write down your emails somewhere)!

2020 came and I had a lot of free time, as I'm sure a lot of us did, and I went digging determined to see if I could find just a trace of some of this music. The songs on Youtube had been songs I wanted to expand on and rearrange for a while now but what happened to the other songs?

Well, that said, after a late night drinking and clacking away, following rabbit dung down some hole in a log on the internet. I found both EPs in their entirety (plus some tracks from that concept album I was not prepared at all to write and record in 2012).

To be quite frank, and not toot my own horn because I never learned to play horn nor do I own one, these recordings weren't too terrible for someone who had no clue what he was doing and was mostly improvising all the lead melodies and also was not, at that point, remotely knowledgeable on theory or how to even play "leads".

Anyway, I intend to revamp this project some time in 2021 under a different name. The internet is flooded with Mellowtonin-dubbed artists, albums, and songs. A different moniker is in order but the vision I originally had is much more attainable now, with mellotron, organ, and synth plug-ins (plus access to an analogue synth) as well as me actually having the confidence to do vocals.

How does this qualify as a story, you may ask?

I'm so glad you asked. You totally asked. I read your brain drippings.

Mellowtonin, and the music associated with it, was all originally written in it's roughest format during an Ambien-induced sleep walking episode. That's right. I actually would take my Ambien, as prescribed mind you, and slither into my silken sheets that were covering my banging box springs and mattress on the floor, only to awake and find recordings of music I had no recollection of recording.

When I discovered the demos of the songs, I had to actually listen to them and figure out what I had been playing to reproduce them. None of these songs are particularly complex but it was a good exercise for me at the time. If you don't try and transcribe my ear already, I highly recommend it. Being self-taught primarily by ear the first several years of my life playing, it was something that I embraced and I think really improved my playing (later -- much later).

Several of the song titles were lifted from poetry that I had previously, before the discovery. Most of that poetry has been lost somewhere on the internet as well. It's probably for the best, honestly. However, many of them were about dreams that I had while medicated with (medically prescribed, for my legs) morphine. For those that fancy a bit of Greek mythology, morphine allegedly got it's name from Morpheus, the God of Dreams. Pretty interesting, I thought.

That said, this isn't intended to be a plug for music that I wrote. Just a bit of an interesting story behind the music I wrote at the time and a example that you can find inspiration in strange, unintended places. I also like to think it's a bid for stream of conscience writing -- or more like stream of unconsciousness writing.

The dream isn't dead but I no longer take Ambien thanks it also leading to an incident where I started driving during a sleep walking incident. Morphine, as much as I feel it helps with the pain relief, is also no longer a part of my drug regimen. You know, the one this dude uses to keep his mind limber.

I'm glad I didn't sleep on the opportunity to rediscover this stuff. Maybe one day I'll be comfortable with releasing all of it for free once I have an actual album that I feel is worth pushing on people. I just hope it doesn't put the public to sleep.

(Also in the batch of recording found were live tracks from when I played at the famous Spare Bedroom and Bedroom Closet. There were actual incidents where I did perform some of this music at parties for the 4am, after too many beers, audiences. I wish I could find stuff like that but I digress.)

I hit my snooze alarm and slept on myself for a decade.