Once upon a time, long ago, I was an actress in NYC who hated auditions.  Due to being an overweight 20-something, I didn’t have many auditions to go to anyway, so my friend Simon and I took matters into our own hands and did some funny little musical shows in a few nightclubs.  I eventually went solo, becoming a fixture in gay nightclubs on the Lower East Side with my short one-woman musical extravaganzas, making a little dosh and garnering a loyal following.

A few years into it, I got tired of being funny all the time but really enjoyed the songwriting process, which at this point had been limited purely to comedy stuff, so I made a shift to writing standard, more pop-type songs.  The more I wrote, the more fascinated I became in arranging, building harmonies and creating perfect (to me) little 3-minute packages of sound from nothing.  I loved it.

I became especially enamored of the technical side, though because I was a singer and extremely cruddy keyboard player and most certainly not an audio engineer, I had to learn everything from scratch…how to hear, basically.  This is a hard thing to do on your own, but I managed by reading incessantly, experimenting, taking music theory classes, anything I could do to better understand music, the nature of audio and sound engineering. I never became a proficient instrumentalist, but would write in layers with the help of sequencing software, samplers, synths and my first recorder: a little Fostex 4-track.

As a fun aside, the first computer I ever bought was an AtariST, bought specifically for its built-in Midi ports (enables you to hook up and control electronic instruments, like synthesizers, directly to your computer, as well as to each other).  This was mid to late ’80s, btw.

When my Grandma died she left me some money which I spent on better recording equipment and tons of outboard gear.  This was before digital was affordable for home studios so a Tascam 8-track reel-to-reel was the hub of it all, mixed down to a ¼ inch two-track, then eventually DAT when that came on the scene.

I recorded a bunch of songs and eventually put an ad in the Village Voice for musicians and started a band.  The bass player, a loveable Dominican fella named Rigo, became my boyfriend and biggest musical champion – still is to this day.  We lived together for a few years.

Eventually, Rigo and I broke up, the band dissolved. I wrote a few more songs but then sold all my equipment.  This was when I got the job designing audio/visual systems for Planet Hollywood, which consumed my life for the next few years.  It was interesting work and made it easy to leave music behind.

But I didn’t just leave it behind, I shut the door and threw away the key.  Meaning, I didn’t sing again, save for a couple drunken times in a karaoke bar.  And I played one song off my demo for maybe 3 people in the last 19 years.  I couldn’t even listen to my own music.  There was something so raw and almost embarrassing about it, that I’d ever written any in the first place.  The same way I sometimes feel like a poseur in running, I felt that 10-fold with music.

Cut To The Present
It’s nearly two decades later, and Rigo, who lives in the Dominican Republic and makes his living playing music, has been hounding me all this time to send him the songs so he can do something with them.  I was able to demure for years because they were all on DAT, a format that isn’t used anymore, which suited me fine because I didn’t want to hear them again.  I was afraid it’d be one big cringe festival.

As fate would have it, Nick, my ex, had an old DAT player stuck in the closet.  After the umpteenth request from Rigo, I finally borrowed the DAT machine and transferred the material.

Hearing the songs after all this time was both startling and incredibly bittersweet, reminding me of who I was at one time and how deeply I cared about it.  It’s funny how I can talk freely about past drug use or even my mother’s suicide without a moments hesitation, but this has remained under wraps for all these years.  I need to get over it.  It’s just some music.

So without further ado, here is one of my songs.  It’s one of my last ones written back in 1992, which I’d forgotten all about.  It’s just a simple, very imperfect demo called Missed The Boat.

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If the player doesn’t work for your browser, here’s a link to the song.

And for those who care about such things, here are the lyrics.

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