Here's a lo-fi collection that plays to my strength (melodic pop), and reaches way back to almost the beginning of my career, i.e the early 80s, fleshed out with a couple tracks, also lo-fi, recorded on a Tascam 4-track Porta-Studio in the aftermath of my record deal, when I was kind of licking my wounds. It brings back many fond memories, mostly of the gratitude I feel for the recordists and musicians who believed in me enough to take the time to realize my music. I remember many good times as well.

I've always been a synthesist; I don't really have a narrow, distinct, never-violated original pop-rock style. I'm eclectic; a combiner, a borrower, an assembler. When I hear something cool, I take it, and fit it together with some other, far-flung thing I thought sounded cool, and combine them.

My first love was sixties A.M. radio, which was incredibly eclectic. So, much like the story of Paul McCartney hearing The Lovin' Spoonful's 'Daydream' and writing 'Good Day Sunshine,' I would often get inspired by whatever I was listening to at a given time, try to do something in the same vein, and hope that it would fit together cohesively with my other, often quite different songs by dint of my personality and unique, consistent quirks. I never stuck to one sound; I've always been a Walking White Album!

I hear my Abba fascination come out in 'Coming in for a Landing' and 'Rules of the Game,' my Costello imitation (so many of us did!) in 'Master of Time,' 'Burning Next to My Old Flame' and 'Top Priority.' There's some BoDeans in 'One Too Many Times,' some Bruce/Brian Wilson in 'Long After Summer,' and a very suburban take on Specials/Madness in the manic ska of 'Heart in Shape' - which has some overlap (along with 'Burning Next to My Old Flame') with another love of mine - those semi-faceless early '70s a.m. hits. Really, what genre is something like 'Smoke From a Distant Fire' but 'Early 70s A.M. Radio Music?' On 'That's Where You'll Find Me' and 'You Won't Be the Same,' it's really hard to tell where they come from, the multitude of influences are so many. Perhaps these are the ones that are the 'most me.'

I love the lo-fi sound, and it's interesting to think about why. What is it about a lo-fi recording that is appealing? Certainly not the clarity, or separation, or richness, or body. Lo-fi recordings are often muddy, hissy, one-dimensional, include tape dropouts, warble, and other (un)pleasant surprises. But sometimes there's something about them, a strange character, that touches your heart. Maybe it's that the flaws and the decay remind us of the flaws in ourselves, and the fact that we know we too are decaying. Or maybe in the ineptitude, the human striving is rendered poignant. Or maybe it's that it so clearly sounds 'of the past,' and of course the past is always poignant, because - we were younger then. What lo-fi recordings lack in clarity in richness, they often make up for in personality and vibe. Also, it's often a refreshing alternative to an overly slick, over-produced, over calculated musical world. Finally, lo-fi recordings are evocative and poignant because they embody and convey the striving toward a romantic ideal of perfection undertaken by an inherently imperfect mechanism. It's this built-in futility that is the locus of their ache, charm, innocence, poignancy, and vulnerability.

From the the very beginning of the history of recording music, the goal has always been one thing: to capture the music as best as possible - as close as it sounds to hearing it real life. In the early days, the twenties through the sixties, nobody ever liked or strived for a lo-fi sound; nobody valued the limitations of the recording equipment; nobody said 'hey, that amateurishness is a good sound - let's endeavor to keep it bad;' everybody kept striving to get it better, clearer, more realistic.

But as recordings improved, there grew to be a charm, fascination, and soulfulness about the recordings of earlier eras. They transported you back to earlier times, and suddenly, you weren't just listening to the music, you were also listening to the texture of the limitations of the earlier recording technology. So in a sense, there were two things to enjoy, the content (the music), and the fingerprint of a bygone era.

The records I first heard, which were mainly pop, British Invasion, Motown, Stax, Psychedelia, Sunshine Pop, One Hit Wonders, Garage Bands, Soul, R&B, Funk, Bubblegum, and that slew of somewhat indefinable music I usually think of as 'the 1960s Golden Age of A.M. Radio;' were all part of a first wave of music that, though might have spanned various genres, they all had a new thing in common: they were all part of a music that we listened to, not, as previously was the case, to simply hear the music, but to hear the 'record.' The way it SOUNDED. Bands strived not to just get a document of a song. They wanted the record itself to be an event, to have a unique and indelible character about it, that added to its personality.

And you simply cannot duplicate the aura of a 'record' from an earlier time. It's interesting: when the streaming era began, in attempts to receive some more income from music they'd made in the 1960s, but had no purchase on the masters of, artists started re-recording their classic songs. In some cases, they went to great pains to re-create the original record as faithfully as possible. But guess what? None of these re-recordings hold a candle to the original. Not one, that I've ever heard. It's not even close. Because beyond the vocal, the chords, the emotion, etc., there was just something in that moment, that early, limited equipment, something in the air, in the youth, that cannot be duplicated. It's invisible, but it's everything. Breathtaking.

So I love the songs here because I hear myself striving very passionately and sincerely to write, sing and play well, but mostly I love the humble, primitive, innocent sound of the recordings. I like the tape drop outs, the asymmetric mixes, the warble, the hiss, the blur, the lack of dimension, the all-too-human slightly-off balance of levels due to having to bounce down tracks, to clear them up for more overdubs. Whoops, we buried the tambourine; oh well, record it again. Now there's two - a quiet one and a loud one - that's interesting! A million things like that. It's poignant and charming to me, and I suspect, is responsible for a good amount of the emotion that I feel when I listen to them. It takes me back to an earlier time, and visiting another time expands my sense of being.

I hope you hear them that way too. As a technological species, we've learned that perfection can be reached, or something close to it. But it's almost like I'm figuring out that - as inevitable as reaching for perfection is - just as we do now and they've done all throughout history, perhaps it's everything but perfection that constitute the places where true, human heart and soul live. We are all so mortal, and so flawed, and doing the best we can, making the best of our mistakes and limitations, always working with what we have, however inadequate, and like analog tape - always decaying.