The First Chapter Album Cover

Songs formed in the late 1990s and brought forward decades later as memory, music, and proof of creative life.

I started playing guitar when I was in Grade 6.

The songs in this album began taking shape in the late 1990s, when I was in high school and university. It was a time when I could finally afford to buy my own music, a computer, and some home recording equipment. For the first time, I had a way to record the music I had been writing and playing.

Back then, I hoped that one day I would return to these songs. I imagined developing them further, refining them, making them better, and finding a way to share them more widely. But life moved on. I grew older, other interests and responsibilities took over, and some creative work waited quietly for its next moment.

Now, a couple of decades later, I am bringing these songs out for a different purpose. They remain imperfect, but they are still part of a real time in my life.

They are recordings from a younger version of myself, and they are also a way to show how music, songs, and creations of the mind can be inscribed on the blockchain: timestamped, preserved, made accessible, and shared with people today and in the future, long after the moment of their creation has passed.

These songs carry thoughts, ideas, experiences, and inspirations from a particular period of my life. They are personal, direct, and honest. They came from a time when I was still trying to understand love, sadness, longing, faith, uncertainty, and where my life was supposed to go.

Maybe by demonstrating how this can be done, a new generation of creative individuals, with their own voices and talents, can use paths to earn from their music that were much harder to access when I was growing up.

And for those who, like me, once made recordings that stayed private or waited for the right way to be shared, perhaps now is the time to share them too. Because they took time, feeling, and imagination to create.

At the heart of it, you are leaving something behind that was once part of you. Proof that you existed. That you thought about things. That you felt things. That you tried to capture them and express them through songs. And now, you leave them behind for others to hear.