I finished this one up sometime in August of 1998. I can tell that my composition skills were improving and I became a little more experimental, but you'd never know unless you turn the volume all the way up... i mean ALL the way up. I thought that buying a real microphone would be a step up from using a little hand-held cassette recorder, but I was wrong. I bought a $6 microphone from Radio Shack [ whcih has evolved into the headset mic I use in my one man shows today], plugged that directly into my stereo, and played as loud as my family would allow, and it still wasn't enough.

Anyway, if you can stand the poor quality, this is a great record in my opinion. This version of "The Coffee Song" would be the best ever if I had any sense when I recorded it. Another high point to me is "Stem," my take on a song by Hayden Desser, a great musician from someplace in Canada. The real song's about how this guy wanted to buy his girl a rose, but the wind ravaged the rose, and all that was left was a stem. My version takes the melody and adds some distortion and other things that escape my memory at the moment. It would be great if it were audible. This record also sees my first experimentations with solo bass guitar and the first appearence of Joshua Howard Yoder [who has become an integral part of live Canned-Teen performances] who does a great dramatic reading of Billy Collins' "Print."