This past year or two, I’ve been focused on a project I contemplated from time to time in the past decade, specifically revisting and working with songs and demos that were written and recorded on my Tascam 388 8-track 1/4 inch recorder in the 1990s, which for whatever reason never saw their way to final released versions.  

 

The first one of these tunes is actually the one that provided the impetus to test the hypothesis that this was a project worth undertaking; I Know How You Feel was a song that, over the decades, I would from time to time try to remember and hum in the shower. Seemed like a song that someone with a heart would compose, an occasional fantasy of mine.  It was composed in a period of relative clear-headedness and sobriety around the time my son Jasper was born.  Much Neil Young was ingested and incorporated in everything I did in those days.  In the years since it was written and shelved (not edgy enough for the Kiss Me Screaming, per my marketing wizardry), I would remember snippets and be curious about the rest of it, but since it existed only on a 1/4 reel of tape from 1993, I knew it would be an undertaking that would take a bit of effort to actually hear.  

 

So, in late 2023 I purchased a food dehydrator (magnetic tape that has been sitting for decades will disintegrate during playback if it isn’t baked at 130°F for 24 hours), then bought an audio interface that would accommodate sending 8 tracks of audio from the 388 to Logic Pro (the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for macOS) and finally located the reel, baked it, waited another 24 hours (required after baking) and popped it on the 388.  

 

Hearing the full song again was quite satisfying, but it presented a host of new issues I hadn’t anticipated – like, it was a pleasant, fully formed song, but my recording techniques were not particularly sophisticated in early 1993, so certain instruments sounded ok, others not so much.  Ditto for the vocals.  Nevertheless, I copied the tracks into a new Logic session and began exploring what the potential and limits were for this performance of I Know How You Feel. I played with EQs, compressors, reverbs, sweeteners and de-sweeteners on all the tracks.  Once I reached a point where I thought it sounded better than it had directly off the tape, I mixed it to an MP3 and set it aside, excited to look at some of the other songs on the reel, such as demos for the Kiss Me Screaming songs Ton of Bricks and Tumescence, as well as another fully-formed unreleased song that we’ll be looking at in the future, The Only Secret You Can Keep.  

 

When I finally came back to the song a few months later, I decided I’d make an attempt to re-record it, rather than try to massage the existing tracks into something listenable to my now 65 year old ears. It just didn’t seem like there was enough good sounding stuff to work with from the original tracks. So, in early summer 2024 I cut the song again with just acoustic guitar and a vocal, then asked Chuck Mauk and Pat Prouty to lay down drums and bass, respectively, which they did in their typical, exemplary fashion.  By then, however, I was immersed in other lost nuggets from other reels, each song presenting its own unique challenges and opportunities for me to explore and work with.  

 

Key to this entire process has been working on the mixes at Big Sky Recording with my dear friend Geoff Michael, without whom this would all be a much less satisfying process, to say nothing of the undoubtedly diminished quality that would result.  I take the mixes as far as I can in Logic, then export the tracks to WAV files and send to Geoff, who then creates new sessions with these tracks in Pro Tools (Geoff’s DAW of choice).  Every few weeks we get together at Big Sky for a few hours and work on whatever songs are occupying my attention at that moment and we –  sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly – finesse them into what we believe to be listenable objects.  

 

So, over the course of 2025, I worked on I Know How You Feel sporadically, adding the melodic line heard at the intro in a variety of voices – strat, piano, mellotron flute and glockenspiel, as well as incorporating the line on my Hofner acoustic tuned to open G, which plays throughout the song.  I did make an attempt to replicate the harmonica part from the original recording, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it might be best to use the original, so I flew that in and the new recording of the old song was complete, with only that lone harmonica from the original demo surviving to the final version.  I’m happy to say that so far this turns out to have been an anomaly, as most of the songs completed so far are comprised of a very high percentage of, if not all, performances from the original recordings.  

 

By the middle of 2025 I had about 20 of these old songs buffed into some kind of presentable shape, with many more laying dormant on unbaked reels. It was at this point that I settled on releasing these in a series of albums, called obviously enough “vault I,” vault II,” etc. 

 

vault I is comprised of the first 14 songs, all originally recorded in the 1993 – 1996 time frame.  Next month, I’ll be releasing a second single from this collection, “The Devil Whispers in My Ear,” as me and Geoff put the finishing touches on the other 12 songs and send them off to be  mastered by John Scrip at Massive Mastering.

 

If Khalid Hanifi songs are your thing, 2026 is going to be a good year.  Thanks for tuning in!