Where did this terrible music come from?

I have a rule. Whenever I'm taking things too seriously, I need to poke fun at myself. And here's the way I'm gonna do that: The latest Grande Valley Auction Incident record, Archive Volume Three. This is a compilation of songs from my last year of graduate school, in 2003.

During that final semester. I felt all sorts of confused. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was done with classical guitar as a potential creative path. Whatever interest I had in academia as a career evaporated. I wanted to get out of town, but I hadn’t graduated yet. I was lonely, misdirected, and totally weirded out by the world. It's little wonder these songs came out of me.

I recently found these songs hiding on a cassette tape in my closet. The discovery shocked me. It wasn't like Christmas morning. Unearthing them sent a shiver up and down my spine. I knew I was in for it, but I had no idea by how much.

I’ll tell you directly: Archive Volume Three contains laughably bad songs. The singing is terribly off. The recording quality is total shit. I captured them by pressing record on a vintage tape recorder and throwing a Hail Mary. The songs make me cringe, hard. Imagine if someone found and published your junior high diary. That level of cringe.

No matter what, we could all use a good laugh…

And yet, I’ve noticed more than a few burdensome external forces invading my thoughts. I sense a weight in the air. The world has weirded me out yet again. I feel completely in danger of taking life way too seriously. I can’t have that. Gotta lighten things up a little bit.

So, I offer these slow-core, lo-fi, piece of shit songs for your amusement. After I got over my initial shock of listening to them, I felt better. I hope you get a huge belly laugh out of them and feel better, too.