The beginning

Turtleneck was born in the winter of 2004 when I was living in a spare room at my brother J's house. I was previously living down the street in an apartment with Chris Behlke and Justin Turcotte, who I was in a band with, but I was running out of money and it made more sense to move back home with my folks. Shortly after that, Justin freaked out and split and the band broke up and shortly after that, I was looking for any way to get out of my parent's house, so my brother helped me out.

As has been the case for countless "bands" before me, Turtleneck started out as a joke. I was playing around with Garageband — which was a brand new program at the time — making goofy beats and I was really psyched to finally be able to do something with the ridiculous records I had been collecting from Savers and the Salvation Army and yard sales. I made beats and played acoustic guitar along with them and threw in some samples and things were sounding good so after a while, I challenged myself to write a rap. I knew it would be ridiculous, but I also knew that I could write a better rap than some of the schmoes who get paid to do it. Before long, I roped Chris into doing some songs with me and I had an album on my hands.

I burned 75 copies onto some printed discs I got from 5inch.com and I did some linoleum block cuts for the cardboard sleeves that J had left over from a design job he did. I used J's old letterpress in the basement to print the blocks and to add the text to the front and back.

All this time I was working at Newbury Comics (and still do) and I managed to convince DJ, who used to handle consignment there, to sell the CD even though I told him that there would be no shows played in support of the album, no publicity, no nothing. There was initially three copies in one store (my store, North Attleboro) selling for $4.99 (I think I made $2 from each sale). Thanks to friends and strangers willing to give it a try based on the hype my coworkers tried to make of it, I ended up selling 50 or so copies. Not a lot at all, but I didn't care. I thought it was amazing that I actually had people I didn't know buy the CD from me and then later come into the store and ask me if I was the Turtleneck guy and that they thought it was really good.

And dammit, you can't tell me that "Quack Quack Quack" isn't still awesome.

So, all this to say that it's about time that I do something new. I've been struggling with music off and on (mostly off) after Turtleneck and I don't see any good reason for it to continue that way.

So I am sending out this letter to some friends that I think can help me. I wanted to include my friends because I feel that I might be inspired by their contributions where normally I would be grasping at verbal straws. And also because I wanted to send some letters because it's just not done enough anymore.

Nine letters are going into the mail today and one more I expect to hand-deliver. There would be an eleventh, but one of those folks is in between addresses right now and I don't know how to reach him by mail.

If you have received a letter and are visiting this site, please feel free to post a comment to this post to confirm your participation.

I plan to begin working on songs in the order in which I receive the lyrics and I will try to update the site upon each receipt as well as when I finish a song.

Thanks, friends