the short story:
i write and sing slightly illiterate songs very loudly and very quietly in rooms. sometimes other people help me do this, and sometimes i do it alone.
the long story:
between 2002-2004 i played accordion and saw and sang in a few bands in the niagara region where i grew up and one band with a friend from california that only played one show. in 2004, my friend chris , who i was in a band with for a summer, convinced me to learn how to play the guitar because it travels better than a piano and i had lent my accordion to a friend for a while. i recorded a bunch of songs in my bedroom at my parent's house whenever i couldn't sleep. my family sang on one song, my friend dustin did some slide guitar parts, shelby sang, jessica sang, meghan sang, and mat sang. i put some of them together and released an album called "one day the horses will have their revenge" which is something my brother said once while we were watching the olympics. the songs were mostly about my hometown, feeling restless and being unable to sleep, coney island daydreams, and my friends. i didn't play a lot of shows during this time, mostly because i didn't really know how to, but somehow i managed to play a high school auditorium, a porch, someone's backyard around a campfire, a pizza joint in portland, a movie theatre in nevada city california, and a queer festival at sarah lawrence college. in 2005, i released an ep of five pop songs about lakes, boys, bad dreams and the revolution of the horses called "sleeping on lake erie." i only made 30 copies and each one had a different cover and was completely hand-made (my hands got very sore from writing the liner notes over & over) and they had random things from my bedroom floor thrown inside. my friend matt helped me paint the covers. all of the songs were just me alone, except for the last song which was 8 people crammed into my bedroom singing & dancing. my friend lowell and i also made a record together but in different rooms under the name children eating birds and released it almost simultaneously with the ep. he made all of the music and i sang a bit and opened and closed drawers very quickly. vinnie de la paz drew pictures of weird kids trying to eat birds which we xeroxed onto card stock for the covers. i spent the last six months of 2005 making another album called "make blankets your yard" in my bedroom and then in a dorm room that i lived in at york university in toronto. the album was about processing major change and being in between things (mostly trying to convince myself to grow up but i had pretty bad peter pan syndrome and still do). the songs were somewhat unintelligable for the most part, i think, looking back on it. i tried my best to make it a more "produced" sounding record but i had very bad equipment. shelby and mat both sang again, dustin, tony , matt, and jana all sang, too. i hand-painted on folded and glued card stock again for the covers but had the same typewriter liner notes inside. generally i painted and folded them as i traveled. in 2006, i started touring a lot with friends (tony, dustin, thomas , and mat), playing shows anywhere i could: attics, clothing stores, living rooms, coffee houses, basements, forests, puppet theatres, art galleries, dorm rooms, bars. a lot of the traveling was done by greyhound bus. while i was on the road i wrote a collection of songs that were very straight-forward (which was a bit new for me) and repetitive, mostly addressing my feelings at the time about being queer and my relationship with my family. lowell and mat helped me over the next year to record them. lowell added some banjo and harmonica, shelby and mat sang again, and my friend eric played trumpet. these recordings were released in 2007 as "mantra songs" even though i never felt like the album was really "done." all of the copies of this cd have been made out of different things. originally, they were in fabric cases that my friend laura made for me, but i ran out of them pretty fast and have since been making the covers out of old books that i find or that people give me. simultaneously, i spent a lot of 2006-2007 working on two other projects: a second children eating birds cd (mostly songs about medication, cannibalism, rivers, and language) and an album called "divorce lawyers i shaved my head" which is about sexual relationships and illness (in various forms). in 2007 i played as many shows as i could, mostly on tours with my friends tim , kristina , chris , and richard , but also a one month tour alone on a bus (worst decision i've ever made, maybe). richard started playing drums sometimes and a plant magician/musician named jordan started playing the saw, autoharp, and banjo at a few shows, too (in upstate new york he joined me for a weekend). by the end of the year, there was a pretty solid group of us making music together (that being sarah & dee , jason a., and jason m. ). in december, we were snowed into my house and my friend bryar helped us record "divorce lawyers i shaved my head." the entire upstairs of my house became a recording studio and everyone was pressing buttons and moving microphones around. we convinced kristina to add flutes to a song, too. 2008 will see more touring (mostly with a band, although some without) and the release of both "divorce lawyers i shaved my head" and the second children eating birds record, "of hospitals."
also, you can listen to a performance i did live on phoning it in . i sang through a telephone for a radio program and the telephone made it sound like there is a group of people singing with me.
