I started working on an album of my own songs in 2013. It was the first such project I’d done in 18 years. During that long gap, I made several albums as a member of various bands: Fuller, the Grand Old Party, and Bedsit Poets. But the closest thing I had to a solo record (eight songs cut in two Boston studios) was completed in 1995, and hardly anyone heard it because I never bothered to release it. Almost immediately after the mixes were done, I moved from Boston to New York to become a magazine editor, and from that point on I never saw the sense in putting out an album as a solo artist.

Fast-forward more than a decade. When Bedsit Poets broke up in 2009, I already had a handful of relatively recent songs lying around that I liked but didn’t think were right for the band. Over the next few years, the stockpile slowly grew, and by the spring of 2013 I realized I had enough good tunes to make a proper album without having to delve into my huge archive of original music from the ’80s and ’90s. (I may very well raid that archive for future projects, but this time I wanted to focus on stuff that felt new to me.) So I posted 14 demos on SoundCloud—you can still find them here—and invited people to comment. After taking those comments under consideration, I moved ahead with the process. It took three months to record, another three months to mix, and another couple of months to master, but yesterday I gave a final okay on the audio and approved the front cover, which looks like this:

The rest of the packaging is still being finalized, but the whole thing should be complete within the next few weeks. When it is, I’ll announce further details, including an “official” release date.

It feels great to be on the brink of getting this music out into the world.