Introducing: "Cliff Notes"

When I think back on the time period when I was writing and recording the songs in "After the Fact", I'd probably sum it up as a time of trying things out and seeing what would happen.  I had already been through what I suppose could be thought of as the initial phase of songwriting: The pure thrill of listening to something that you'd created.  This often is seen in bedroom-type music, recorded on a 4-track using minimal equipment...

Offhand, though, it seems like once that thrill has sunk in, you start thinking more about production. And so you try to get access to higher quality recording equipment and environments in which to work. With all this, you're now able theoretically to do something that's pretty professional.  And yet the question remains: "how (good) will it turn out?"...

Well, it was definitely during this phase of still being largely untested that the album was written and recorded. After that, I was working on the final piece: getting the music out, and seeing quite a few things still needing to be done...  Eventually I decided to make a CD, and release just about everything that could be used from the music pool. What emerged was the 11-song release that's called "After the Fact".

Since then, I'm still happy with this CD, particularly in terms of how it's sequenced. I think it does tell a story pretty well. But eventually it occured to me whether the same story could have been told in fewer songs? This was a really intriguing idea: seeing how that would look.  So I put such a playlist together and tried it out ... and eventually realized it was a creation that really didn't need to exist in this world.

It took a while to realize this, though, because I'd thought of a great title ("Cliff Notes") and also found a great image for Bandcamp... And so I introduced this hypothetical EP "Cliff Notes", and then finally withdrew it. There is no longer any trace of it on the interwebs, other than this blog post showing that at one point I really did introduce it!