My Beer Can Collection

As teenagers in the seventies my friend Hughie Zanger and I would ride our bikes to a town dump in Excelsior, MN. We’d be a dozen miles from home, completely unsupervised, scaling mountains of municipal trash, looking for cone-top beer cans. That’s an appropriate metaphor for this album project.

I’ve always had a jag for cataloging and archiving things. Whether it’s beer cans, postage stamps, antique office supplies, airline paraphernalia, coins, vinyl records or vintage sox, the compulsion to hoard and keep track of things has always captivated me.

In 1998, it dawned on me that nearly twenty years prior I had first joined a band, dreamed of writing songs, releasing records and touring. So, to commemorate the occasion, I began trundling through old cassette recordings and other odd representations of work that had accumulated along the way––items that could never land on a conventional album. It was essentially a beer can collection of mostly rusted trash, but not without its peculiar charm and history.

There’s no theme to Nudes Volume One. The array of performances is too broad. Notice how maudlin the song “I Wish I Had The Nerve” is, written when I was 17 years old. Compare that to the absurdity of “Young & Relentless,” written at 21. Compare that to the over-serious “Real”, written at age 33, and perhaps an arc emerges––but I don’t think so.

Two songs here appear on 2012’s TRUE album—both being long overdue for a proper recording. They would’ve certainly been forgotten had there not been an archival project to unearth them. So as much as I bemoan all the time I wasted (and still waste) going through old photos, board tapes, multitrack recordings and papers––I’m glad I didn’t forget about these dear old pals of mine. That’s said, it’s still hard not to scold myself for spending so much time looking backward instead of moving ahead.