Old Things

I come from a family of musicians. When I was a kid I started learning the piano but I stopped due to the life style of my parents who were seasonal workers in a ski resort. that was a great disappointment for me and I developped a kind of rejection for all the instruments I could have learnt with my relatives. Yet I kept a growing craze for electric guitar. Finally, when I was 16, I bought a book, borrowed my father's classical guitar and started learning by myself.
No sooner had I learnt the basics of the guitar than I made the first attempts to write my own songs. I really enjoyed the feel of the nylon strings, but my aim was to get an electric guitar. Maybe I was bound to play the electric guitar... A short time before my 17th birthday I sent a postcard to a magazine, to take part in a draw. There was only one prize : a Japanese Squier Stratocaster by Fender... and I won it. I gave this guitar a name : it's called Gabrielle, and I still play on it nowadays.
I made my first multitrack recordings in 1998. A friend had lent me a 4 track tape recorder and I challenged myself to record at least one song every two days during my summer holidays. It was my first "Introspection session". I wrote songs inspired by my everyday life, my doubts, my fears, the questions I asked myself about the meaning of my life, the world I lived in...
The first Introspection recordings consisted in guitar and vocals only, but soon I started using anything that was near at hand. I used my classical guitar to make percussions, managed to get a bass and crappy Casio keyboards...
For my 18th birthday a guy I had provided housing for sent me a thank you gift : my first multi-effects pedal, a Zoom 2020. I immediately began experimenting with sounds. As years went by I brought in new toys and new techniques, switched from tape recorders to digital recorders, and fiddled with my brother's drums.
Most of the songs I recorded for the Introspection project have remained in boxes until now and few persons have listened to them. One of the main reasons is that I hate the prominent presence of beats I recorded from my keyboards most of the time. Another is the poor quality of the sound of the earliest recordings.
Nevertheless I've decided to release a few of these songs now. They are not great but they are part of my musical history, and some have a strong sentimental value for me...