10 years ago on this date (September 25, 2015), I released my first album, "Medium Rare." Listen to it here:
https://kylemicho.bandcamp.com/album/medium-rare-w-mike-joncas
https://open.spotify.com/album/2pdvgE1eSvDrR4bnLdckXu
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzd_e2XeUXQ0ehSGLdDdsrf15iGwRYOQl&si=9WbaPfwFlL-srl6W
At the time, I was freshly 17, and intending to create a demo to send to record companies. I asked my friend Mike Joncas to help me record it, since I didn't know how to play drums or piano. We booked a six-hour "Demo Deal" session at SubCat Studios in downtown Syracuse.
Based on the demos I'd been recording directly into my iPod in my bedroom, I thought we could record and mix ten songs in that time. It's a miracle that we recorded eight. I learned that day that a professional recording studio is quite a different animal than what I'd known up to that point. Thank god for Jeremy Johnston, the sound engineer who helped see the project through without compromising the spirit or quality of the tracks.
We went back a week or two later for another six-hour session to mix, master, and sequence the songs, and left elated, with a copy to listen to on the car ride home and an order placed to print 100 CDs. It was incredibly exciting.
I soon learned that, being 2015 and not 1995, record labels generally no longer accepted unsolicited CD submissions. This bummed me out at first, since I thought the CD we'd made was pretty good. I quickly realized, though, with Mike's genius cover art and a professional mix/master/printing job, this was not a demo—this was an album. I started selling "Medium Rare" CDs to my friends, teachers, coaches, family members, enemies, etc. for $5. This was before Spotify was really a thing, and most people still had CD players in their cars. The album took on a life of its own. In my quest to create a "professional demo," hoping to get signed to a big label, I had inadvertently become an indie artist.
Mike now lives in the mountains of Japan, so I thought the best way to honor this mighty 10 year anniversary would be to re-create the very first YouTube video I ever made—a live version of the only acoustic song on the album, "Mourning Dove," recorded in the basement of the house I grew up in (which is on the street Mourning Dove) on Halloween 2015.
Here's the original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwyqj3Nv7lw
And here's the re-creation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9p-Fx1uzJ0
I hope you enjoy my effort to celebrate this trippy anniversary. Man, time is a weird phenomenon. Stream "Medium Rare," today and every day, and I'll see you in ten years!
PS — Why did we call it "Medium Rare"? Because it wasn't quite well done.