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  Peculiar Songs for a Particular Audience…Home 4-track recordings of John Snell the Tenth 1997-2001
  with one ’93 (Drive and Guitar…), a ’95 (Sinner’s Soup) and two ‘96s (Two Miles from the Middle of Nowhere; Mad Cow Disease)
  First off, I would like to thank “The Intellectual Babbler” Marco Dacio for extracting this album from me. Without him these recordings would have gone unreleased. I never would have thought to show the world this lunatickle Inner Self.
  Dang. The World. Are you out there?
  
  Nothing inhibited my insanity from escaping forcefully onto the tape.
  Peculiar Songs was an opportunity for my muse to make an album without me. Recording myself allowed me to drift completely from the outside world—no engineer to derail my stream of conscious—nothing to bring me anywhere near society (except some inbound phone calls. One phone call birthed Hello? J.A.C. Auto, and another can be heard at the end of I’m in a Tent Version 1). Mixing the songs alone in headphones allowed me to get totally inside the music. The sound would make up the ground I sat on and the walls and ceiling around me. Then I would mix the songs from inside that room! Whoa. Dude. Where am I> I think I just left the real world again…
  
  
  My home recordings often start out as a serious effort to demo a song, but this sporadic je ne sait quoi leaps out of me and messes things around to make something different. I’m in a Tent is a great example. Version 3 represents what I had in mind when I started Version 1, but for some reason I spontaneously used a whole track to describe the scene out my window. Well, Version 1 is what it is, and I like what it is, though it’s certainly not the song I set out to record. What really forced these recordings into being is that I have a hard time taping over anything—especially sounds that came out of delightfully unexpectedly. With only 4 tracks to work with, I would often be left with no room to finish a song as planned. Frustrated, I left many recordings without handing down to posterity what I set out to accomplish. I didn’t mix the songs or even go back to listen to many of them until years later (when I got enough money for Christmas to buy a used mini-disc recorder). Then I spent the following January going through my old tapes and mixing songs to mini-disc. I realized the recordings I ended up with may not have been exactly what I intended to document, but they were definitely interesting. I mailed some of the mixes to my friend Marco, and his immediate response was an enthusiastic, “When is the album coming out?!”. Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting at all! Album> What album> My impression of these recordings was that they were not only unreleasable demos, but they were unreleasable failed demos! But I was intrigued by them, and interesting is interesting, art is art, and any open window to a muse can be mind-expanding. So, paradigm shifted. Seed planted.
  All the mixes for Peculiar Songs are performances in their own right. I took some of the more involved recordings (I’m in a Tent V1 & V3; Unsustainable Industrial Spread, etc.) to Soliton (Bloomington, MN) to get help mixing from Jeremy Ylvisaker. At times, both Jeremy and I were hunched over the mixing board, both adjusting volumes and rotating stereo effects. My notes from mixing I’m in a Tent V1 read: “I played the vocal and electric guitar and Jeremy drove the car!” (in reference to what “instruments” we were in charge of during the mix). Ye’ol Ylvisaker is just chock full of ideas, and he knows how to execute anything. And wherever we differed on liking part of a mix, whoever liked it would simply argue, “It’s good because that’s where the song falls off an underwater cliff”, or “That’s just a happy person driving by”.
  So! Thanks for your interest and attention to detail, don’t forget to listen through headphones (!) and I hope you’re the Particular Audience for which I’m searching.
  
  Mixed from cassette to DAT in 2002 and earlier by John Snell at Home or by John Snell & & Jeremy Ylvisaker at Soliton. Mastered July 2003-January 2004 by Tom Herbers at 3rd Ear (Minneapolis, MN). Final tweaks continued through Nov. 2005. Artwork & layout by John Snell the Tenth. All instruments by JS10 except: some cat food crunching by Toppsy in I’m in a Tent (Version 3), Amy Cavanaugh singing “Ahh” in Mental Capacity, and Gia Campbell reading 2 lines in Unsustainable Industrial Spread.
  
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