WORK IN PROGRESS - “(OUT HERE) ROSS’ FLATS

So the first album I ever paid someone else to record for me was in 07. I think. There abouts. “D Day” was 11 songs, and in retrospect I don’t know what I was thinking when we decided to do it the way we did. I wrote and home record on stolen internet beats, then went into the now long forgotten home studio of Nik Kozub (Nik7 of Shoutoutoutoutout), re-did the vocals over the stolen beats, and then spent time with 3 friends who could play instruments rebuilding the music underneath the vocals. That’s not really the way you should do that. The results are.. what they are. It was fun. I said some cool shit, I said a few awful bars too. I was 19 or 20.

I listened to the album again for the first time in probably a decade at least, and it’s a lot of nostalgia. It’s sorta creepy how lyrics you once knew by memory will still emerge from the ether when you hear the songs played years later. Music I made always takes me back to the times I made it. Some people do photo’s, or a journal. I’ve rhymed mine, and performed it. Probably not a ton of people would remember those songs at all, but there’s a handful of people who probably would, and likely they’d be reminded of the same days of sweaty pub shows on Whyte Ave that I am, and of the people around them at that time.

”Write new ones to replace the ones I forget” has always been the method. I say that in some song, can’t tell you where though.

I’m writing about that “D Day” album from so long ago because recently I talked a bit online with my old friend who had played bass guitar on it, Lee. He was 1/3 of a band called “the 40 Thieves”, and has since been in several other bands I can’t name off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure he’s only continued to become “more successful” as far as bigger tours and shows and such. He’s on his way to being a lawyer now, and I think not currently in a band.

We spent a while the other night reminiscing a bit and it came up that he’s learned a thing or few on a sampler over the years, and has been toying with making some new music. He linked me to a British pair of guys who I forget the name of, but who he said used to make punk rock, who now “make what I guess you’d probably be able to call Hip Hop”. I checked a few tracks from them and said I could dig it, sorta an off kilter, spoken word flow like The Streets, simpler looped drum beats with some rock-ish elements more prominent than might be usual. Lee said he’d been making stuff that sounded like them.

One thing after the next, I asked if he’d send an instrumental he’d made over when he got a chance, he did, and I wrote and rapped this song I posted here, “Out Here (Ross’ Flats)”. It’s still not fully formed or professionally mixed and mastered or anything, but it’s Soundcloud, I think it lends itself to being a creative testing grounds with it’s less permanent posts, and I like the idea of sharing things I’m still working on. This one’s talking about a place we used to go to bush parties near the rural city we both grew up in. I’ve known Lee since we were in like grade 2. I remember his dad helping us hammer a boxcar racer together like we were the Little Rascals. And here we are, making songs in our 30s about being in our teens drinking and fighting in the bushes. Life’s a weird trip.

Lemme know what you think, if you want to. Thanks for checking it out.

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