"Ten Years Ago" Ten Years Ago

Ah, 2008. I vividly remember the day Scott and I met at Melt here in Lakewood to open the box of compact discs I ordered from Disc Makers, only to find out that I submitted the back artwork wrong, sending Scott on a few late-night runs to Office Depot to correct my mistake.

The album itself probably took about 15 days to record, but those 15 days were spread out over three years. We started recording during Memorial Day weekend in 2005. Our friend Brett had just started his recording concern Firefly Studios, which was then headquartered in an old farmhouse in the village of Haskins, Ohio, where there still really is only one stoplight.

He invited us out originally to just record two songs for free -- basically just a hang session for the bros, plus also some valuable experience working with your typical songwriter "just make it sound good" morons. (I really speak for myself here -- Scott minored in sound recording in college and actually interned in a highfalutin Nashville studio once.)

When we got those two songs (Oh My Head and 7,8,9,10) in our Hotmail accounts (remember, this was 2005), we were floored. Brett took two of my janky-soundin' demos and made them into full actual rock songs.

At that time Scott was in a band called Treysuno (they never capitalized their band name and that always bugged me) with a hirsute and amiable guy named J.D. Fleming. In addition to being a cool dude with a wicked sense of humor, he also was (and I assume still is) a fantastic rock and roll drummer. He helped us out a great deal and added immensely to the vibe of our first two records.

So every four to six months after that, we would reserve a long weekend at Firefly to lay down the shit. We used those weekends also as an excuse to hang out with friends in a creative atmosphere. We'd buy a ton of food and alcohol and basically eat and drink ourselves into oblivion, hopefully after we were done with recording for the day.

I'm basically a prickly loner, but Scott and J.D. and Brett all had friends over all the time, and it was extremely fun. That was around the time that I first really had a full conversation with our future bassist Eric that didn't take place in, like, Howard's Club Hell. Despite that, Scott and I played all the bass on this album. And when I say "Scott and I," I basically mean just Scott. I definitely did the bass on songs where there are only two or three bass notes.

I'm sure we'd do a thousand and one things differently if we were recording it now, but this is still an album that I enjoy and that has some of our best songs on it. For some reason I outright rejected two songs that would have fit perfectly -- a song of mine called "I Know I'll Never Be Happy" and a dope-ass Scott tune called "Cypress Root." Maybe we'll Special Edition this some day and remix and just add a bunch of CGI shit in the background.

-- Bobby
August 2018