A Treasury Of Song Vol. 3 Pt 2 -- Songs Of South Florida

Here's an EP John and I wrote and recorded very quickly during a break from school in late 2002. The story of our trip to his parents' house in Fort Lauderdale is related in the first track.



The Class In General Vs. The Topic At Hand
Songs Of South Florida

http://www.mediafire.com/?0mhd2jltmnj

A Treasury Of Song Vol. 4 Pt. 2 -- The Levittowners -- Organized Music, 2002

Here's the second batch of Levittowners songs, actually enough for an LP although these are very crude four-track demo recordings. At this point I had stopped singing and kind of just gave up writing lyrics to focus on playing guitar. Which was fine because John was writing a lot of very good stuff. John wrote all the lyrics here except "Would It Be Dishonest," which I wrote and sang, and "< < 0," Brian's one recorded contribution to Levittowners, although there is still a bit of his excellent solo material I hope to post eventually. The music here was for the most part developed in real collaborative fashion, jamming on our instruments at John's house.

Download Organized Music:

http://www.mediafire.com/?10jitfdymfh

A Treasury Of Song Vol. 4 Pt. 1 -- The Levittowners -- The Beginnings Of Group Life, 2001

The Levittowners were a band composed at first of John D. and myself (we'd just recently been roommates recording as The Class In General Vs. The Topic At Hand) along with our new friend Annie who had recently transferred to our college.

In fall of 2001, John had moved to a house off-campus that he shared with two other students. Almost all Levittowners activity took place here in his tiny bedroom. John continued to play drums, at first using the same homemade drumkit from the Class V. Topic In All The Math album. He also purchased and made extensive use of an electric organ. Annie and I both sang and played guitar and during a short period our friend Brian sort of rotated in as a frontman, although his songs were very much fully formed when he introduced them. Our friend Ryne played bass guitar, except for the recording session where we finally broke up, where bass was played by our friend David.

Although we had I think only two shows (one a show Ryne organized, us opening for the Plastic Mastery at New College and the other a house show opening for who I cannot remember) we played together and wrote together often. Probably the truest collaboration I've ever had in a band, although that came with a lot of problems and may have led to us going nowhere in terms of worldly success and breaking up before we released anything. But we may have been doomed by being an indie pop act in Sarasota FL, where at least at that time there really seemed to be no venue for this kind of music. I think we were all super busy as students anyway, so probably we didn't really have time to think about trying to play shows or whatever.

We went through at least three different phases, and John put together three short collections of demos, each showcasing a very different era in the band's history. The first, available below, being this sort of shambling, precious, super lo-fi trio sound, long before we were a live band of any sort.

The Beginnings Of Group Life:

Download here