Sometime around 1990, I bought a used multi-track recorder. My cousin, Mitch and I started writing songs by just playing whatever came into our heads while the tape was running. We often started by intentionally trying to produce something that sounded like somebody else and other times……we just played. We added guitar to most of the songs and even enlisted a couple of “real” guitar players (Dave Davies and Greg Brauer) to add tracks on some of them. At some point, we just stopped. We pretty much forgot about the whole idea of actually producing a finished album and the tapes went into boxes.

I found the boxes in 2008 but, by this time, the tape recorder was way-past working. Fortunately, a friend had a similar recorder that was “almost” working. I combined parts of both and ended-up with a machine that would playback the old tapes. This was just about where it also became painfully obvious that time is not kind to audio tape that has been stored in attics, garages and basements for twenty years. Most of the tapes were too far gone to use, yet I still transferred all that showed any hope of restoration into a digital format. After about a year of work, the number of possibly workable songs shrank from over thirty to only eight, but this disappointment turned-out to be a “happy accident.”

It always seemed to me that the minimum number of songs needed to constitute “album” status was ten, but there were only eight workable songs. This motivated me to complete two songs that would probably never have gone beyond the “demo” phase. I contacted Dave Davies (one of our original “real” guitarists) to see if he would add a guitar solo. In one session, he recorded the guitar breaks for “Doo Dah” and also added some new guitar parts to some of the older songs. Final mixes, mastering, artwork and other post-production work burned about another year on the twenty-year clock.

The result is an accidental collection of songs that reflect a wider range of influence than what is usually expected. Twenty Years was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait.

Larry Hensley
October 10, 2010