Clearing the vaults for 2024
I now have a lot of music available on Bandcamp—and soon there'll be more
My 40-year history as a musician and composer is littered with projects that barely got heard. Or, in a bunch of cases, never got heard by anyone except me. That’s the price one pays, I guess, when one places creation above promotion by several orders of importance. You make something, you move on, you make something else, you move on, and soon enough you have an extensive back catalog that may as well not exist. But today, it gives me enormous satisfaction to report that more of these past projects are readily accessible to listeners worldwide than they’ve ever been before—on six full albums and three EPs. To which I can only say thank you, Bandcamp.
Why did it take so long for all this stuff to surface? Lots of reasons, but I’d say the primary one was a basic lack of commitment to music-making as a career. I already knew as a teenager that the life of a working player wasn’t going to be mine, at least not full-time. I still remember the moment I realized this: either late 1986 or early 1987, a little before 2 a.m. outside T.T. the Bear’s Place in Cambridge, Mass., watching my friend’s brother’s band the Lemonheads loading amps into their van after a gig. The prospect of regularly performing similar nocturnal exertions did not fill me with joy.
And yet writing and playing and recording music were central to my life. So I formed groups, joined others, composed feverishly, and filled dozens of four-track cassette tapes with home demos—recordings to which just a handful of friends were privy. A small sampling of these demos (three hours’ worth!) can be found on my Soundcloud page under the heading Box of Urchins Not Received.
Once I entered my twenties, I reached out to the rest of the world just a little more. The band I was in at the time, the Dark Young, went into a professional recording studio and cut a full 11-track album. We released it in 1994 on cassette only and sold it in two exclusive locations: Tower Records on Mass Ave in Boston and Newbury Comics on Newbury Street, just around the corner. Our public existence was limited to the radius of one city block.
Shortly after the Dark Young album came out, I decided to make an album of my own. Again recorded in serious studios, it contained eight songs and was completed in the spring of 1995. Within weeks, I was offered the position of senior editor at Musician magazine, which entailed moving from Boston to New York. I accepted, made the move and became a professional music journalist for real. The solo album went into a drawer, where it remained for decades.
For the next couple of years, my music-making went back to being a solitary home affair. Then one of my Musician colleagues, Michael Gelfand, invited me to join his band. It was called Fuller, and in its initial incarnation it was a quartet: drums, two basses, and guitar (me). Both of the bassists sang, as did I. This version of the group cut an album’s worth of songs in 1998 and 1999. But before we could do much of anything with them, the second bassist quit, and the recordings we’d made were suddenly rendered superfluous.
Because the second bassist had been the best singer in the band, the rest of us decided to forget the singing and carry on as an all-instrumental power trio. This was not the most commercially minded move of all time, but it kept Fuller going for about five more years. We gigged around the Northeast, briefly had actual management who got our music placed in a couple of indie films and TV shows, and played a memorable set in Austin, Texas, during South By Southwest in 2003. We also kept recording. Two EPs and one full-length album got sold at gigs or, more often, given away to people; they technically saw the light of day, but it was a very dim light. I labored over the mixing of a second album for months but it never sounded quite right. By the time I gave up, in the summer of 2005, the band was essentially over. We all had demanding jobs and either already were or were about to become parents. Life had gotten in the way, as it so often does.
In the many years that have passed since, I’ve continued to make music on and off, both with other bands and under my own name. But the awareness of so many “lost” projects has long nagged at me, like a constant low-level itch. And in 2024 it’s going to get scratched at last.
Visitors to the Bandcamp website—of which I hope you are one—can now find a page devoted to the Dark Young, containing both our first album from 1994 (the cassette-only one) and our second album, which we started making in 1995 and finally completed two decades later.* You can find a Mac Randall page, which features my 2014 solo album I Call Time, my 2016 solo EP Germination, and that 1995 album that stayed in a drawer for a quarter-century or so, now titled Teach Me to Burn. And you can find a Fuller page, which currently contains Earl, a compilation of our quartet recordings from the ’90s; the 2001 EP The Tiers Suite; and two releases from 2002, Year of the Rat and The Lotus EP.
I say “currently” because there’s more to come. As I write, the ill-fated second Fuller album is getting a much-needed remix, in preparation for its joining the official catalog on Bandcamp later this year.
Catalog. It feels good to say that. It feels good to have a catalog. Whether or not anyone ends up liking it, or even listening to it, is beyond my control. But the simple fact is that now anyone can hear it, which until recently was impossible.
For 2024, I wish you the best of luck in adding to your own catalog, clearing your own vaults, and bringing the long-hidden into the light.
*I feel I should clarify that the two Dark Young albums have already been on Bandcamp for years, thanks to the efforts of our drummer/archivist/sound wizard Geoff Chase. My own Bandcamp page has also been around for a while, but Teach Me to Burn is a recent addition. And the Fuller page is all new.