In 1994, the Stray Katz again began talking about playing together. As everyone was living quite far apart from each other, I decided to compose a bunch of new material and send out cassette dubs with accompanying lyric and tab sheets so members could begin rehearsing, and I tried to make the most out of my rudimentary home studio: a Toshiba laptop, the first version of Windows (still DOS-launched), a used Roland D10 synth and introductory-level Trax MIDI software. My son was three years old and, as I was still a stay-at-home father at the time, my studio was a small upstairs townhouse bedroom on Erin Mills Parkway in Mississauga, Ont., where I’d set up trimmed plywood sheets for an L-shaped desk space and painting everything green and pastel grey. It was really quite a lovely wee room, and I worked there most evenings from around 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.

The upside to my ’94 recording efforts (which lasted about nine months): I learned a lot about digital audio production in a Windows environment. I sharpened my mathematical skills (as Trax required much numerical computation and input for editing) and I expanded my compositional ability. I also built a small table and chair and set them with a Casio keyboard for my son so that he could play along beside me when he wished. (I can still remember his first original piano piece—a song he happily announced was called “And So the Princess Must Die.”) The downside to the whole thing: As an effort originally envisioned as part of refuelling the Stray Katz, it was a failed experiment. As band members had long been accustomed to jamming things together live in the same room, no one bothered much with the cassette dubs and tab sheets. I felt a bit foolish in the end in having tried to work with them in a way I previously hadn’t, but then I figured music (like life) was all about change and new things. So I chalked it all up to experience and put the cassettes away in a box where they sat unheard for 20 years until 2014, when I decided to transfer them to digital before they completely degraded. (Admittedly, the recordings suffered much in this way before I re-recorded them.)

Some of the recordings (e.g. “Let’s Go Back to the House,”) seem to slog along in parts due to original MIDI lag. (My system at the time was being pushed far beyond its limits.) Other songs like “It’s Only Love,” “Burgelle Street” (the second incarnation of the song) and “Anyone Can Plant a Seed” would be re-composed and recorded in later years. “Peanuts” is my arrangement of the well-known Peanuts cartoon theme song. “Only You” is my version of the same-titled song by Yaz, and “Melting Ice” is my arrangement of an original song composed by my brother.

As all tracks were originally written and recorded as rehearsal tapes, the recordings have lyrics but no recorded vocals. (Indeed, I didn’t have the equipment to record vocals at the time, even if I’d wanted to.) I’ve uploaded them here so they can simply be heard and don’t become lost in some drawer after I’m gone. They’re just an archive, and if no one ever listens to them, I believe they’re nonetheless an important repository by me to my future self—so that I might know it was me who wrote these songs in a former life and I can continue from where I left off and experience a second chance to play this material live in what band I might yet find myself in.