In 1996, my college sweetheart and I eloped and fled Wisconsin for New York. I was a Midwestern indie rocker raised on a steady diet of The Replacements, R.E.M., Hüsker Dü, and Dinosaur Jr., and after 5 years of playing Milwaukee dive bars to growing audiences but diminishing returns, it was time to try a “tiny fish in a giant pond” approach. We ended up in a 1 bedroom in Weehawken, NJ, where I spent my time documenting the friction and excitement of our new life through music. I wrote songs that reflected on newlywed bliss, world events and adjusting to an urban environment filled with rough edges. At the time, I was trying on a lot of hats: starting a scrappy indie rock band with Hoboken scenesters, trying my hand as an anti-folk artist at the Sidewalk Cafe and wrestling with a Gateway computer to make demos I didn’t yet have the skills to pull off. In October 1997, I was asked to return to my hometown to play one of the biggest venues in town – The Rave at the Eagles Ballroom – opening for Dan Bern. We piled into a van with a cadre of Hoboken hangers-on and drove from NYC so I could play those songs to an enthusiastic, packed house. It was a fun night and, in a stroke of luck, the show was recorded.
By 1999, Burnside Project took hold. We eventually signed to Bar/None Records and released several albums which made a cultural impact including one song as the theme for Showtime’s Queer As Folk and a short-lived splash of being “big in Japan.” Burnside Project would lead to other projects – my attempt at remixing and producing as Pocket, my chamber pop albums as Mon Draggor, my return to indie rock with Big Mother Gig and now with my current act, Long A. Decades past but still that group of songs from 1997 lay dormant.
Some of those tracks did evolve. “Cleveland” found a home on the first Burnside Project release while “Soak In Your Dreams” resurfaced on a Big Mother Gig record decades later. But the bulk of that material remained unreleased. I always felt a debt to these “lost” compositions. Then, in 2024, my dear friend and Burnside Project bandmate Paul Searing passed away unexpectedly. I was devastated. His loss made the idea that I might pass some day without having these songs in the world begin to gnaw at me. I didn’t want these songs to die with me. In early 2026, I decided to rectify that. After initially attempting to use new technology to “fix” those old Gateway demos, I realized it would be less work and more fun to just re-record them from scratch. I enlisted frequent collaborator Dan Long to help me finally capture them with the fidelity they deserved but couldn’t achieve on ’90s home hardware. The resulting 2026 release is a 20-song collection—a definitive look at the “missing link” in my discography. It features 11 pristine, newly recorded studio versions of songs celebrating their 30th birthday, paired with a technologically restored and mixed live set from the 1997 homecoming show. It serves as both a memorial and a vital missing chapter in my history that the public has never heard until now.