So here's the thing: I met this guy, a drummer, and it was quickly clear that he was someone, if you were in a band, that you wanted to play with. Most drummers have enthusiasm, but this guy had both skill and a sharp edge; he wasn't an easy sort. Anyone who's ever been in a band knows that without a great drummer you're fucked (and with a great drummer, many sins are forgiven). But he was always playing with other people, more musically inclined, jazz chops and 5/4 time signatures and all that stuff, and I was just a scruffy post-punk-goth-electro art school guy. It took a couple years before meeting the others, who where also art punks (and also scruffy), but he played bass and she played flute and EBow guitar and they looked amazing together. One random night I was finally able to lure drummer guy along to try to play a few tunes together at their place. And then it happened, and it was good, almost immediately. Good doesn't mean easy, but lots of stuff followed: parties, basement recording sessions on the cassette deck, art openings, gigs, multi-track recording, tours, enthusiastic critics, crazy shows, substances, friends dying, LPs getting pressed. We made the soundtrack to our own lives falling apart and coming together again. Looking back, it's easy to see that this complicated marriage of four people (which is what a band is—particularly a band that wants to push stuff a bit) was maybe the most formative relationship of all of our lives, even though it didn't last very long. But maybe it did, because I'm writing this now. And now, it seems inconceivable that all the stuff before happened when we were children really, just barely twenty-somethings, and that day when the four of us first jammed together was over 35 years ago. The original four in Fourwaycross, yet again.

Feels strange. Feels good.

—TD, 2016