These days I write songs in conceptual units e.g. “album”, “record”. That started as soon as I started writing songs - but has developed over the years. The level of conceptual integrity can vary, and many times I’ve just failed and sputtered along the way

(1983-85) Early attempt

1983 - Bored Outta' My Mind

• Bored Outta' My Mind
• My First Cigarette

I only have the sketches of the album cover, I lost the music and can’t rememeber any of the songs. I figure that is because they were not that good

First ‘album’

1985

Serenade

• Jennifer
• Serenade
• Cetacean Song (later become ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’)

I’ve lost all recordings of this - I think there were 20+ songs. I recorded it using a walkman, and a jambox with one microphone

(1987-92) Figuring out the ‘craft’ (so to speak)

1987

Circus

• Regullus
• Satan’s Desk
• On Stage
• The Fictional Room
• Six Foot Five
• Redundancy
• Five Laughing Ghosts

oddball set of songs

1988

The Ten Conveniences

• Shifting continents
• The workplace
• Spare Time, Spare Change
• #3 thesis
• The Year of The Prayer
• Making Ropes, Making Circles
• No Trust
• Actual Furniture
• I Would Never Put a Front Up
• Wooden Chain

The first album I did research for

1989

Motion Sickness

• Matrix
• Escape Velocity
• Liquor is the Torment
• Be Animal, Be Stupid
• Assembly Line
• Sleeping Walking
• The Universe and Dr. Feynman
• The Degenerative Case

More ‘punk’ inspired at this point

1990

Play

• Definition of You
• The Appearance of Dr. Ego
• Scissors, Paper, Stone
• Sleepy Cyclops
• The Foundary
• Modular Guy
• The Formation of a Cloud
• Mindful
• The Formation of a Multitude
• Memorial

[Perpetual Sophmore] outtake

I believe at this point I’ve sort of developed my own inner cosmology. It may not have been communicated well though

1989-90

Chronicles and Deeds (NOTE: Lost, I don’t remember the name, or order, or when)

• Wilcox, Arizona
• Hand-feed Blues
• Negative Radicals have no Solutions
• Among the Monuments
• National Anthem
• We Are All Connected at the Feet
• Hard Life

It was a bit of a “working-class” album if I remember correctly

1991

Relique

• Thieves, Hidden
• The Messanger
• You Are a Painter
• Reality Therapy
• The Hypocrit
• Phoenix Song
• Lazy Dog
• Daykeeper
• Lifegiver
• Jigsaw Puzzle
• Underground

1992

The Turbulent Movement of Fluids (not entirely sure of year)

• Upside Down
• She Makes Her Bed
• Jazzy (instrumental)
• Struck Out
• Floating
• Transient
• Immered
• Twister
• The Traveller
• Hillary
• Spring (instrumental)
• Courante (instrumental)
• Current Trend
• Myth

a quick album - mostly written in a 2-3 week period when I tried to get a job in Austin, and failed

The Book of Two Ways

• Wretched Land
• Strange Friends
• Quentin Dejected
• Paper Stone
• Black Drink
• Paperwork
• Slide
• Miserable and Wretched Day
• Craving
• Over and Over Again
• Decompose

Fugue (instrumental) [outtake] Here come the Missionaries [outtake]

1993-97 - Lost, wayward, aimless, disorganized - Walter Klang time #1

1993

Archeo-Astronomy (Lost: incomplete - no order)

• Black Out
• Creep
• Skymaker
• Backwards
• White Crash
• Bicyle
• Withered Man
• Siesta
• Merry-Go-Round
• Swelter

Also many random songs at this time - as I was in a band trying to write material for. Much was lost at this time for example (not completley lost):

• Caboose
• Mr. Potatohead
• Disposable Day

See (Lost: no recordings left, not written down, don’t remember)

• Aloft
• Brother
• Baptized … (4-5 more - I don’t remember ?)

1994-95

Bed of Nails (Lost: incomplete - no order)

• Trampoline
• Drunk
• Fall
• Carnaville (turns into “Welcome to Nashville”)
• Ghosts
• Nights and Weekends
• Mr. Invisible
• Neverlasting Love
• Bullshit
• Little Red Bucket
• Neverlasting Love
• Happy New Year

1996-97

Welcome to Nashville

• The Rain at His Back
• Big Enough for Two
• Welcome to Nashville
• Play Your Hand
• Bonnie & Clyde (lost song from 1993-94)
• It’s Not Working
• Neverlasting Love (from 1995)
• The Ballade of Floyd Collins
• That Train
• Brother (from “See”)
• Two in the Morning
• Nights and Weekends (from 1995)

Written (and pulled together the year I spent in Nashville). Some other songs then appeared later - or never appeared at all (“Sad Brain”, “Runt of the Litter”, “It’s Over”)

1998-2000 - Pulling together loss ends

2000

Mizmaze

• Little Red Bucket
• Could Be
• Happy New Year (from 1995)
• Nostalgia
• Nevertheless
• Earthquake
• It’s Over (1995)
• Just Pretend
• Roundheads and Cavaliers
• The Messenger (from Relique)
• Arrows
• Mr. Invisible (1995)
• Twisted Around (1994)
• The Mississippi

outtake: F*ck and Be Happy (1993)

2001

Simmer & Stir

• My Phantom Girlfriend
• Perilous Bed
• Intruders About
• The Runt of the Litter
• Spring to Life
• The Lurker Lurks
• Fiver, the Cat
• Insomniac at Work
• On the Whirligig
• She Lifts the Spell
• Grackle in the House
• Look Into Periphery

NOTE: I re-recorded this album three times so far. The first is mostly on YouTube and the third is on Spotify etc…

2001-2008 - Walter Klang time #2

Long break - was writing material for the band

2008-2014 - not working on much, or at least moving slowly

2010-2014

Crossing the Fogline

• Time’s Ashes
• The Dance of Death
• City of Ghosts
• Weightless
• The Station Fire
• Little Abelard
• First Boxcar
• Carolina in the Car
• Off-Kilter
• So Comes the Flood
• Sleepy Moon
• Scarecrow Don’t Scare Anymore

2016-present: writing more again

2016

Life of a Tobacco Fiend

• It’s Freezing Out
• Be My Betrothed (Being a Proposal of Marriage)
• Threnody, for the First Born
• It Took a Thousand Men to Lift That Mountain
• Work My Bargain
• Valentine’s Day Blizzard
• Wolf Is Back in Town
• Where Will the Sparrows Go?
• Troubled Mind
• The Toil of My Work (An Apology)
• Hit the Paydirt
• Misbegotten Thief
• You’re My Redemption
• Eventually, It Goes (It Ends)

back to doing a little research when composing an album. This was my first “narrative song-cycle” e.g. set of songs based around windows into an underlying story

2018

The Artificial Clock-Maker

• Troubled Days
• Underground
• It Would be Lovely
• April, In Good Time
• Small-time Criminal
• Motion Picture
• Have to Be Alone
• You Make Things Interesting
• For Seven Years
• Disappear With Me
• Assassins or Thieves
• Like Stained Glass
• The Impossible Task
• I’m Finished?

2020

Mélodie and Dædalus

• The Most Beautiful One of All
• The Summertime
• Your Great War
• The Novelty of You and Me
• You’re a Star
• Begins an Addiction
• Drifting in Smoke
• Misfit, the Mechanical Bird
• Crazy Is
• Rot. In. Hell
• Dream of Tempest
• I’m Your Shadow
• My Little Bloom
• This Malady
• Unfinished Novel
• Small Room

2021-22

Pitch: A Morality Play

• Death, the Traveling Salesman
• Float in my Raft
• Curse Upon Your Kin
• Imaginary Me
• Josephine, These Days
• You’re My Sunlight
• Fashionable Friends
• Poison Tree
• Still Looks Blue
• Stole My Girl
• Blackjack John
• Vixen, Vivian
• Dreamt Up World
• All the Illusions
• Days of Make-Believe

2022-23

Flowers Appear on the Hill (unpublished)

• Love the Love that Loves You
• When I’m Ninety-Four
• My Life as a Tree
• Old Tetanus
• Rip Van Winkle
• Box of Hope
• Hesitance
• All That is Fleeting
• They Grew Entwined
• Eyes Cost Centuries
• Childhood to Bird
• Dorothea’s Jar of Miserable Things
• City Mouse, Country Mouse
• Advice of Daedalus
• Without Electricity
• The Flowers on the Hill

to be continued … (I don’t know what’s next)