I Haz an Idea.

My holiday project last year was a cover of a song from a seasonal musical that meant a lot to me as a kid. I am really pleased with how that one turned out.

I didn’t have any particular ideas for this year… that is, until this past weekend, when a notion started to take shape.

I might have been subconsciously inspired by Taylor Swift redoing her old teenage songs, a concept I adore; plus, since bringing a bunch of stuff back from my childhood home, I have been low-key brainstorming how best to preserve the least cringe of my own vintage material.

The idea is to release an EP where I redo five songs I recorded as a kid and set the new and old versions side by side. I’m picking ones that I think were pretty direct forerunners of what I do now, and that showed me becoming more mature and universal with my writing. It helps that a lot of the material I did while in school somehow feels wintry to me, probably because the structure of the school year always had me working on a lot of projects in late fall and early winter.

The goal here is to draw out some unrealized potential, but at the same time to keep it simple and not apply too much polish. The raw quality was part of the charm, and given that the person speaking now is already going to be less innocent than the one who was speaking then, I don’t want the whole thing to feel contrived.

And, with that… away we go – !