These are songs I wrote and recorded in my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn from the ages of 8 to 18.

The first few songs were from the days of my first band, The Band Of The Land, when I was 8, 9, and 10 years old, and were mostly about being in a band and being in middle school.

The next 16 tracks were from a period of very intense, prolific songwriting and recording when I was 15, 16, and 17 years old, that covered a wide range of often abstract, eclectic subject matter and musical realms, including some where the only instruments are charango and voice (“Vacation Story” and “Snow Globe Part 2”), some with heavy use of hand percussion and a variety of layered instruments (“Eyes on the Box”, “Travel”, “Resting Place”), and some with a primitively recorded “full band” arrangement (“Grow” and “6 Train”).

After that, the album ends with a few songs from my late teens, when I became very involved with the NYC antifolk movement and adjacent scenes like folk-punk and fast folk, which coincided with a shift to more direct subject matter and sparser, uptempo arrangements, all of which had a lot to do with me more fully embracing myself and my anger, and breaking certain chains that had held me back earlier in my life. The final song is an ode to my childhood dog, Cannonball, who I took my name from (with permission, of course). The album cover is a photo I took in Chinatown, NYC in 2008 that also appears in the Infinity (and other inventions) series.

released August 8, 2015