As I type this, Stuffit is compressing my NaSoAlMo songs into one convenient .tgz archive. This is making my computer horribly slow and the words I'm typing aren't showing up on the screen right away, and that's a bit annoying. I really think a new laptop is on the horizon for me, right after a new iPod, but hmm, we did have our eyes on that hybrid Highlander that Toyota is introducing this year--What's that you say? Get to the point already? Sorry.

Here then are some songs I did for Douglas's National Solo Album Month thingy. It happened in November of 2004, and the charge was to write and record an album no shorter than 29:29, entirely by yourself. One of the songs could be a cover. Not a hard task for professionals or super-creative types, but I don't think that's why Douglas created NaSoAlMo. The way I saw it, it was for people like me who'd like to make music but lack motivation to overcome their shyness/self-confidence issues/laziness/other excuses. I found it grueling at times, uplifting at times, really fun and really aggravating, and hell on my back as I sat at the computer chair for six hours a night for about a week and a half (I did the bulk of the work while John was out of town, so I could make noise and not be self-conscious about it). I just made it under the wire--finished the last song on the last day in November.

I let the stuff sorta sit and age for awhile, because when I was finally done I didn't really want to look at it or listen for a good month. Yesterday I sat down with headphones, converted everything to mp3, and listened. Some of it isn't bad. Some of it is, but oh well, that's okay for now. Hmm, I just realized the album doesn't have a title, and since our DSL has the crappiest of all upload speeds, there's no way I'm changing it and re-uploading it. Ha HA!

Okay so here's the deal: I'm hosting this, but my account runs two other sites, so in the interest of bandwidth, I also uploaded a few individually just in case you don't want to download the whole thing. It's okay really, I don't expect everyone to grab the whole thing with the honest intent to listen to it all and save it, so if you just want to sample, you can.

• 1 - Holiday Junction 2:20
• 2 - November Dusk 3:07
• 3 - Petals Around The Rose 3:56
• 4 - Nests 2:11
• 5 - Flashlights 2:53
• 6 - Daydream Harbor 3:30
• 7 - Red Wine 3:12
• 8 - Platform 2:51
• 9 - Crash 3:01
• 10 - Black Hole 3:30

The whole thing is right here: NaSoAlMo.tgz (35 MB) Took this down. Contact me if you REALLY want to hear it; otherwise, maybe I'll re-work some of them for later 'release'.

So there you go. I hope you like it. I wish I had the time to go all out and make cool cover art and stuff like Mark did, and maybe someday I will, but knowing how much time it took me to simply upload this stuff, let's not hold our breaths, k?

Update: Fixed the download link for "Holiday Junction", sorry friends.