I wrote a lot of songs in the months that followed the release of 'Speaking in Cursive' but had few resources at the time to record and refine them. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Brittell brothers who lent me their MacBooks and many apartment hours to scrap together all sorts of little songs that never quite grew legs.

In reality, most everything I have ever written and recorded is some iteration of a demo version, because I have always carried the DIY approach close to my chest.

But these are truly DEMOS in the way that most of the songs represented here were then carried into the actual recording process for an album that never was, when my brother and I walked away from what would have been our 'debut' album on July 11, 2007. That was a great and terrible day driving back from Vancouver, Washington.

All of the tracks and performances from those sessions and the masters that accompanied them have since been lost completely. For many years, I considered these songs to be lost forever, stillborn in a word.

But I was young and immature. I was trying and learning, and somehow, these words and ideas needed to get out. After all of these years, I am a firm believer that songs do not expire. But they can stale.

In any case, I am thankful for the time stamp.

It breaks my heart to hear the pain in "Too Late" - a song exploring my sadness and anger over our father. It makes me smile to remember that "Burnin' Sun" was almost an incredible alt-country song. I mostly wanted to re-tell the story from the film, Stranger than Fiction, and I lived on North Main when I wrote it. It still warms my heart. "Hard to Believe" is a story about murder, but not literal. Still not sure what that was about. "Slow Down" was inspired by Ray Charles - but mostly the way Jamie Foxx played him in the film. I could go on. I was 20 then. I am grateful for those years.

So here are the demos, a marker in my story with music.