December Sessions

When I was 17 years old, I worked at a dollar movie theater in the mall. To say this was my favorite job across a lifetime of working in many weird fields, is to understate the matter a great deal.

This place was AMAZING.

I worked with an eclectic group of weirdos and outcasts that helped shape my humor, and general apathetic outlook on life for the coming years.

I love each and every one of them.

It’s also where I met who would eventually become my best friend, and bandmate, Trey.

We were both projectionists, which was a much cooler job when everything still ran on film. You received movies in several metal tins and spliced them together into one, big, seamless behemoth and the sound of these reels moving through the projector was therapeudic in a uniquely powerful way. I absolutely loved that job.

Trey came to me one day in the middle of a shift and asked, “Wanna be in a band?”

I told him, “I don’t really play an instrument.”

“Me either, but I could learn drums.”

“I’ll learn guitar.”

Actual photo we released to the world with more confidence than was appropriate

And so began the most formative friendship of my life. Trey taught me a great deal over the time that we stumbled through learning music together and it’s too much to cover here. The short of it is this: I am a better and more educated man for his intervention in my sheltered and overconfident youth.

The band was amazing and full of cool learning opportunities. We made his backhouse behind his dad’s place into a makeshift studio. He played drums on an empty water jug and a pawn shop cymbal before eventually graduating to a real snare and bass drum.

I had a Hastings brand acoustic guitar and would occasionally borrow his better sounding Ovation. I graduated to a Takamine a bit down the line and it’s still one of my favorite instruments to play.

We booked shows anywhere and everywhere we could. Jason, the owner of The 806 and in my opinion the only reason Amarillo was able to foster an art scene, graciously invited us to play at his new coffee shop and supported our growth throughout the fledgling years of our first couple albums. Without his help, I can’t imagine we would have been able to play nearly as often or had the guts to approach some of the places we did. Jason gave us confidence and even more importantly, his patrons became amazingly supportive fans. We were doing what we loved and hanging out with new friends. It was magic.

Us playing at the 806 many, many moons ago

Almost every weekend we had some kind of show and most of the time we would order pizza afterwards (shout out La Bellas) and play in some parking lot to a small group of friends, making up obscene new lyrics to pop songs and enjoying the sort of trouble best suited to people in the younger stages of life. Still clinging to shattered remnants of irresponsibility and youthful excitement while actively ignoring the encroaching sledgehammer of reality that is adulthood.

Those years are some of the more memorable in my life and I’m so thankful to everyone that made it possible for us to play. The 806 was the biggest standout, but we also played wine bars, Hastings, Roasters, Hot Topic (yes really), and even got to tour a bit.

Side note: I also played at Butlers before I was even legally able to drink there, which was very damn cool to a 20 year old.

That said, I’ve never released the record that started my own wave of energetic pursuit on any of the streaming services. They weren’t around when it came out and, like many things from that time in my life, I find myself reflecting with more embarrassment than nostalgia, both for who I used to be and more pointedly, the level of artistry in the music. I think as we grow and develop our talents we can feel ashamed of the inceptive moments in which we stumbled or didn’t reach the goal we had set out to accomplish.

Ira Glass from NPR has a great quote about it:

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.”

I love this mentality and recently it’s made me more aware of the disservice I do to myself to ignore the early projects and first recordings.

Sure, they don’t reflect who I am as a musician or human at 32, but there’s no better time-capsule to my 18 year old self than to listen to December Sessions. That’s valid, and important, and carries with it a snapshot of a simpler time in my life.

Creating an album now, only happens after I finish work, or when my daughter is asleep, or when I don’t have to mow the yard or do some other boring side-quest that the programmers of this game we are all playing put in place to stretch out the length of the campaign a bit.

At 18, I still wrote songs about girls, but that was also the only thing I cared about, and returning to that singular focus and ambitious belief in music as a career, in a backhouse, with my very best friend in the world, is kinda cool.

So I pushed the record out to Spotify and the others. You likely haven’t heard it if you haven’t known me more than a decade, or if you weren’t there with us, chasing that dream. If you don’t have those nostalgic pangs this may sound like trash to you. But I think that origins are interesting in their own right, and I hope that if you dig my music now, you’ll take a sec to see where things started.

And you know what? I think Fourth Boulevard is still a bop.

Thanks for listening, and to those of you that knew me back then, thank you for continuing to push me forward. I love you all.

Because of the convoluted nature of self publishing music, it may not actually be on Spotify (EDIT: It is now on Spotify, HERE)when you read this, so I’ve included a link to BandCamp so you can listen now if you would like. I’ll post again when it finally hits the big guys.

My other records as An Autumn Rain are more polished and are already on all the streaming platforms. Here’s Spotify: An Autumn Rain

And the newest project: Derek Porterfield and All of His Friends

If you want to know why I use RouteNote to distribute my older music and CD Baby for the new stuff, I’m working on a blog about that right now. Thanks for reading, listening and stuff.