SPL is probably the first "serious" band I was ever in. Initially begun as a cassete-culture project thing with a million members when John and Rob were rooming together in college, SPL eventually pupated into a coherent unit. John and I ended up rooming together, making tape loops all day and droning endlessly on the few chords we knew. When I say we made tape-loops I'm not talking about some high-tech digital sampling. I'm talking about physical loops of tape, running all over our room on pencils, legs of chairs, whatever would provide enough tension for the reel-to-reel. We looped EVERYTHING. The Carpenters, Helmet, Black Sabbath, you name it. Once we coaxed Joanna into dropping the gospel choir and singing with us instead we had ourselves a real band. We played our first show on Valentine's Day in a classroom at American University. We sent out invitations to all our friends, and everybody who came got all dressed up. We handed out those little heart candies with the corny messages on them to everybody who showed up, and though the crowd was small it was definately distinguished. Somebody videotaped the show. If anybody has a copy of that tape, I would love to see it.

This band will always have a soft spot in my heart. Most of what I know about music, recording, studio trickery, etc, came from this band. And getting to open for and put out a split cassette with Labradford (my favorite band in the world) will always bring a smile to my face (even if the final project was kind of iffy.) In my head this band is synnonymous with growing up, and starting a new kind of life. The music we made was the soundtrack of me falling in love for the first time. When I listen to these songs now I hear an innocence that's really compelling, and SPL remains the only band I was ever in that anybody ever gave a shit about while we were still together. I really miss this band sometimes, or at least the part of my life this band represents.

I've recently been able to encode a few songs (the ones that made up our live set) as MP3s. I'm working on picking out a few gems from our 4-track stuff to post as well. Check back in a few weeks.