This is a rough collage of the jams that I tried to force into being as a proper progressive rock piece. It's still one of my favourite pieces of music by this band, but it never cohered into a proper performance piece. It was also one of the few progressive jam pieces that we managed to get all four of us working on at once. This was the band I signed up for, in action. It's the closest we ever got to sounding like Synchronicity II-era Police. I wrote the lyric the night before we did the first series of jams that yielded this tune, and it just fit perfectly.

04 Bleed Into One

This was one of Derrick's song lyrics that Gary wrote the chords for, and it just worked right out of the box. This was the tune all of our female fans loved, which you better believe gave Derrick and Gary swelled heads. the jam at the end was my reward to the band for when we would do more or less perfect takes of the song.

05 Through the Eyes of a Fool

This was another Derrick lyric that Gary and I both worked on. He wrote the intro, the verses, and I worked out the chorus and the other instrumental parts. This was probably the heaviest tune we were able to perform well as a band. I'm not 100% happy with the sound quality on this one, but sadly, the original cassettes are all in terrible condition now. this was the best I could do to get it to a state of listenability.

06 Thick & Thin

This was a Derrick lyric that I deliberately stole so I could work out the chord progression for myself; Gary was having all of the fun, and I wanted in on the act, dammit! (Derrick wouldn't play any of my songs *pout*). Before the band went on hiatus, Gary still couldn't play this song for me, so I recorded the guitar myself on this take, using his great Ibanez Gibson-copy double neck 12/6 string. I miss that guitar so much.

07 You Send Me Spinning

This is the one! This is the tune that I was proudest of, of all of the tunes the band ever created. It was a pop adaptation of the Hunting, which I sort of intended to work into the suite, along with a number called Up For Air, which would have been my very Yes-ified variation of Monte's Arrival. Anyway, the point is this is what I wanted us to sound like. If it hadn't all fallen apart after I made this album, I think we might have gotten it together.
I plan on rerecording it for the next Etcetera album... whenever that happens.

08 Breathe

This was a Derrick lyric that the guys started working on while I was on hiatus from the band. I came back months later to help them sort it out, and this was the best recording we ever did of the tune.

11 Games

The melodic coda I wrote for the band that ended up being used to end Games.

12 Goodbye

Just a sample of the silliness we used to get us through rehearsals. We used to do two run-throughs of the set list before ending our band practices, and by this time, we were doing the run-throughs consecutively, so I counted them in by doing a line from Henry the Eighth, which got predictable results. Probably get a C&D on this, but I'm not making money from it, so...

13 Henry The Eighth As We Know It

This was a jam that started with a riff Gary brought to band practice and started working on with Derrick, and Dave couldn't make it, so I subbed on bass, working out a very bouncy, overplayed version of what he eventually pared down to a more effective arrangement, which you'll hear in the next track I upload. And yes, that's me wailing Moroccan Roll-style over the intro, because I thought we had something very Kashmir on our hands, and wanted to see if the vocalizing thing would work for it.

The Last Stand take5

I found a cleaner version, thank goodness, because the remix I uploaded before was awful. Anyway, as I said before, Gary was away, so I taught Dave my bass line (which he then stripped down to a powerful, clean version) while I learned Gary's part and finished the song arrangement by adding bridges and instrumental sections and such. The lyrics were written but never recorded. I'll probably rewrite them before trying to sing it for the next Etcetera album.

The Last Stand take 6

These tracks are culled from the years of basement studio recorded cassettes Etcetera made between 1994 and 1998. The bulk of these tracks come from two albums; And Sew One, and And Sew Fourth. The musicians are mainly Derrick Rose (Drums), Dave Bedard (Bass), Gary Falkins (Guitar), and Lee Edward McIlmoyle (keys, guitars, bass, lead vocals).

EddieMack