On a bit of a whim, Lee Armstrong and I ended up making a hip hop album in 2002. I had been playing around with making some beats in Reason, but didn’t have much of a direction. We decided to use the equipment and beats that were sitting around to some good use. We recorded over the course of a week, gradually refining our ideas until they coalesced around six tracks.
In the end, we also put together two videos, both of which had their debut in the Hello! Video show I was curating at the time.
This was one of the more successful songs we worked on together. We’d get asked about this song years later. It was a crowd favorite.
Jordan Hudson plays drums. If you’re curious, you can listen to the earlier demo version.
Sunlite was the second song I wrote just for the band we were calling Bootyproof. Having done a poppy rock track earlier with Officially, we were feeling like this was our groove. We had started to play shows, and these tracks anchored the set.
We were both also going through our own relationship issues at the time, and lines like “in the sunlight of your eyes, I found the rain” were inevitable. I remember writing the “vampires of the past” line in tribute to Sparklehorse, whose Sick of Goodbyes song had fantastic lyrics like “no one sees you’re on a vampire planet…” and were so damn good they’d bring me to tears.
There’s a video, too. This was produced for the Hello! Video show, and the footage came from my friend Lizzie.
This was kind of a half-finished version of this song, but it took a long time to build so here you go. I think we were kind of finding our footing still at this point.
One of the first songs I think I actually recorded with RC. Early 2001 in Portland.
Lyrics just kind of came while we were working out the rhythm in the studio, and we decided to take turns singing. We kind of play around at the end, so in a sense it felt like a “warm-up act.”
The bass line here was so awkward that when I asked RC to play it, he thought I was crazy. “Bill Berry felt the same way about that song on Green,” I told him, to which he responded “Bill Berry ended up not playing that drum part.” Touché.
I think the working title was “The Big Mistake.”
I joined Stumptown Coffee as the first employee in 1999, and soon started playing music with RC Gartrell. At some point it was decided to record an album in the first location after hours, and we formed a band to contribute a track. We chose the name Bootyproof, because it was funny. 🤔
This was pressed on vinyl and released soon thereafter, marking the only time a song of mine has been released on a record.
The inner dialogue of our conflicted protagonist. Another piece intended as part of a “concept album” which I had actually made a booklet and story to go along with, now lost. Recorded on the same day as Word Is Out.
Driving guitar sound, and yeah you can tell I used to smoke. Part of a series of songs I wrote as a sort of romantic “concept album,” but, you know how those things go.
