I'm going to preserve the old write-up below out of respect for the effort that I put into it at the time, but holy shit, I was a deeply unstable person in my adolescence/early twenties, and while that wasn't entirely on me and I'm grateful that I had music as an outlet, this kid sucked. All I hear when I listen back to these songs is intense myopia for the feelings of others and a greater ignorance of the world around me and what life is. And that's excusable to some degree because that was a direct reflection of my life experience up to that point, but it doesn't stop me from disavowing the bulk of this material now. Enjoy?

Jonathan, sometime in 2023.

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DISCLAIMER: These are old sketches of mostly abandoned songs and should not be taken as an indicator of what The Orchid Show represents - merely many steps that were taken on the long way to getting a sense of what it does stand for. As such, while these are - in one sense - my children, I'm not proud of all of them (and there's even a few I feel compelled to send to boarding school for language and sentiments I no longer condone, if ever I did). Life has shown me that I am in many ways a late bloomer, and these recordings are snapshots of petals from flowers my garden no longer grows.

Now, with that out of the way...

In the most technical of senses, I started playing music in the early '90s.

Well, I don't have too much recollection of this, but I used to sing and bang pots and pans as a kid, but we're not going to count that because every kid does that shit… but in 1998, when I was on the cusp of turning 10, my parents bought a piano as living room furniture because that's something affluent white folks do. Now, some of my earliest memories are of playing the upright in my grandparents' living room, so I was pretty excited to have one in my home to make sounds on. And make sounds I did.

Quickly, those sounds turned into melodies I heard in my everyday life, whether on the records my parents played in the house or on the Beatles CDs that I started slowly acquiring concurrently to beginning my love affair with the piano. Eventually, I figured out that the sounds got even bigger - though not necessarily better - if I played using more than my index fingers. Over the next couple of years, I figured out a few chords and - quite honestly - never improved much beyond that, though I sure tried to be Keith Emerson for a few years. I got about as good at drinking as he was - and there's decent odds I'll shoot myself through the head at some point -, but that effortless classical plagiarism and impeccable, savant-like musicality never came. Luckily, I found punk, noise-rock, no-wave, and lo-fi stuff a few years after I fell for progressive rock, and it made me feel less guilty about not being the most proficient or consistent musician or singer. It also alleviated a lot of my concern towards the natural tendencies I had as a writer toward melodicism and arrangements that weren't shy to embrace varied time signatures or extended song forms. I don't know if I think I'd belong anywhere if not for all of these disparate things that I found at an impressionable time, so I'm grateful that I did, though you might not be because you have to listen to this stuff.

A lot of the music I'm uploading here came in the immediate creative wake of a band I was in between 2003 and 2009 which featured a revolving cast of mostly nice boys who were subject to the whims and tantrums of a sexually-frustrated kid who wanted them to be an orchestra and got pissed off when they weren't. And the music kinda sucked anyhow - it was the end product of a lot of anger and zero life experience, and I controlled what came out of that ensemble with a carbon fist, if not an iron one at times -, but the band afforded me pivotal arrangement opportunities and got me onto a stage once in a while, so I can't knock it completely.

I was still in that band for some of these demos (and we even did a couple of these songs live once or twice), but I could tell that things were changing in my writing and I have a decent idea of why, but I won't bore you with the details as I've already written a yard. Plus, I'm pretty much abandoning everything I wrote before the middle of 2016 as it is, with this post being intended as a kiss-off featuring some of my greatest misses. I'm sure I'll revisit a small handful of this stuff in the future, but the latter part of last year shifted my paradigms again regarding the standard I felt comfortable holding my output to and, consequently, there's a lot to cull.

I think there are some promising moments in this young man's catalogue and it's a shame he didn't last long enough to fully realize them before he became someone else entirely.

Cheers,

J. Brodsky

09/07/17 - 2:38 A.M.