In the Key of K

New music! Streaming everywhere! Or buy it at Bandcamp! An artist like me makes NOTHING from any streaming services. If you want to support what we do buy the album at Bandcamp or check out Patreon and the merch store in the link tree.

I’m slowly getting all the merch added to the Merch Store! There will eventually be merch for every track on the album!

In the summer of 1997 I was 20 years old and living at my grandparents house near Cumberland, MD. I started working a shitty night shift factory job and quit as soon as I had enough money for some music gear I had been wanting. Specifically, I ordered a Tascam four track recorder from Musician’s Friend.

After reading the manual multiple times and experimenting with a few things, I started working. I would record drum tracks first–drums were my first instrument and it made sense to begin there to outline everything. I would write out the form/structure of the piece on paper and pound it out. Sometimes it took a few tries to get it right but there was improvement with every note played.

After drums, I would record guitar and bass. I had only been playing guitar for two years and had recently acquired my shitty bass. Vocals were last because I had zero experience really singing and I had to leave the basement studio space to have more privacy while recording them. I found a private place to do it though–out in the middle of nowhere at an old farmhouse in a cow pasture.

After I recorded the vocals (which were horrendous), I mixed the four tracks onto a master tape. I had no idea what I was doing really–I just tried to balance things as best as I could. Then at the farm house I blared my entire first album through a loud stereo on cassette tape–loud enough for the cows to hear outside. It was such an uplifting experience. I made something. I created all this music! I had an album!

Anyway, back to the story, I started dubbing cassettes from the master copy and mailing them to all my friends. Certainly fewer than a hundred were ever produced. About half of this music was later remixed and used for a sort of “best of” album I made in the early 2000s–my first CD recording but it was never released digitally.

It’s getting close to the 30th anniversary of this release (2027) so I have been working hard on re-releasing it. As mentioned above, the first few copies I sent out in 1997 were published as “Stink Bastard” which is a terrible name and was changed pretty quickly to “Lewd Blue”–which is still a terrible name but a title I kept for several years. Now, it goes without saying that I go by “In the Key of K.” Arguably, still not great but it fits what I’m doing here.

Re-working this music was really just re-recording almost ALL the vocals and then remixing and re-mastering everything for streaming audio levels. Some of the songs didn’t age well lyrically so some have been tweaked and slightly re-written. There were some cringy things and lots anger and violence that I toned down a lot but it is still there to some degree because that is what it is and it is who I was and who I am.

To keep with the work’s original intention, everything is still four-track based. I did have to overdub a couple of parts that were really out of tune–a little out doesn’t bother me, as you can tell from my singing and some of these recordings. Two of the twelve tracks were altered because they were an easy punch-in from the four track recordings. It is still my art and my love. 💖

There will be a blog post and merch for each and every track (already published or queued to published😎). These posts are somewhat diary entries about those times, my thought process, what the songs means to me, etc. The lyrics and tab/chords are also included in each entry, mostly.

There were two finished Lewd Blue albums completed in the 90s and Volume 2 is nearly finished with the same process as Volume 1. In 1998/99 I also started working on a third album but only finished a handful of tracks. However, I dug out the tapes and I definitely have enough material to finish the third album from that time (almost enough for a fourth!). Volume 3 will require relearning the songs and starting from scratch for all but three or four tracks.

After writing this music I moved on to study guitar and music composition at university (starting in 1999). My album of new rock music called, Monsters (probably out in 2026), will probably be out before Volume 3. Monsters will be a lot like volumes 1 and 2 but it will be more polished, have better playing and recording, and will use a lot more than just four tracks—no limitations! I will also try to release a finger-style/classical-ish album before Volume 3 (maybe before Monsters but still probably in 2026) either an album of my three guitar sonatas with some other solo pieces or an album of some late 18th/early 19th century solo guitar pieces written or arranged by obscure American composers. I’ve been calling the latter album 13. Busy times!

I hope you will enjoy the music but that isn’t really the point. This music was made by me and is for me. It is my art, my heart, and my life–my heartbeat of existence, my elation, my heartbreak, my love. It isn’t necessary for anyone to like it. It is highly treasured by me and that’s enough.

Track listing:
Sticks to Stones
Sleep Well
160
Love, Love, Love
NS
Moving On

The Dog’s Thorne
Mood Swings
Verse to Verse
The Reign on the Parade
Single File
I Love Christmas!

Notes about the original cassette track listing: “I Love Christmas” was originally called “I Hate Christmas.” It may have been at the end of side one after “Moving On”–I can’t remember. It ended up wherever there was enough space on the cassette as a ‘hidden track’ (it wasn’t listed in the original track listing). The master cassette unspooled at the end so it is too damaged and delicate to double check. “NS” was originally titled “Nothing Special” and was a hate filled angry funeral dirge for my old band. It’s been heavily modified lyrically to take on new life. You can read more about it in the blogpost for that track (additionally there is a huge post coming in the next year about my old band, Nothing Special).