Cabin Songs by Teenager

"Cabin Songs" was an informal three-sided collection of acoustic guitar music assembled in 2012 and 2013 (although some pieces are far older than that), under the Teenager name. It was circulated only among very close friends and, for a time, was offered as an unclaimed prize at the end of a post office box rabbit hole (designed in conjunction with the release of "Summer's Parting Ways" at Attacknine) that no one ended up exploring. The songs collected here are either long since forgotten, or they appear in rudimentary forms while their "properly recorded" counterparts still have yet to surface.

With the Milieu Music Fan Club at Patreon now celebrating eight years on the vine, I wanted to dig something special out of the vaults to express my sincere gratitude to my supporters, and what could be more sincere than a host of optimistic demos and sketches made around my house, often with my infant daughter or my two late canines Morgan and Charly in the background? "Cabin Songs" is definitely rough around the edges (with many of the tracks recorded impulsively with a low-quality microphone) but in 2012 and 2013, having become a father for the first time, I was more than a little rough around the edges as well.

Still, I have always enjoyed the melodies I played on many of these pieces, and listening to "Cabin Songs" again now over a decade later, I wonder if I could figure out how to play some of these songs again if I sat down with the guitar and tried. There's always a part of my creative self that feels tragically unable to capitalize on so many things, because for all of the wealth of material I've published through the years, my guitar music has always taken a back seat - partially because developing it with proper overdubs and arrangements takes so much more time and energy than even making a Milieu album, and partially because I've never learned to notate my compositions, relying always on the memory in my hands and brain-meat to recall how the songs go until I am lucky enough to land them in the studio. As you can probably imagine, the size of that mnemonic window is getting smaller as the years pass, and so many songs arrive, are strummed hastily out next to a badly positioned microphone, and moved on from in order to make room for the next crop.

So "Cabin Songs" and other Teenager recordings like it will always feel bittersweet to me, because they are truly like photographs of a time and place that you might still remember, but the further away from them you become, the harder it is to feel that it was you there in the photograph, and not some other version of you, or someone else entirely. My acoustic guitar music is always the most candid and naked my creative work can be, save for perhaps field recordings, and so I offer it to you, hoping it can convey my appreciation for listening to me at all, this many years down the line. Thank you for being here with me.

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NOTE: This release is priced at the absurd cost of $111.11 - I do not expect anyone to pay this much for this music, the cost is merely a reasonable deterrent in order to point potentially interested listeners to my Patreon page, where you can give me a measly five bucks a month and get this album plus all twelve prior MMFC exclusive albums for no extra cash. I abhor all this late-stage capitalistic internet-exclusive paywall bullshit, but it's the age I find myself working and trying to survive in, so hopefully, you can understand. If I win the lottery that I never buy a ticket for, I'll give it all away for free. https://patreon.com/analogbotany

This is the record label section of The Official Milieu Music Fan Club. Join the club at Patreon to show your support, and get cool stuff!

PO Box 292463
Kettering, OH
45429

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