One summer's day in 2003 (or more accurately, some time between January and December, because it was in Phoenix), a teenager discovered that he could use that Sound Recorder application that came with Windows 98 to record what came out of his computer speakers, as well as what went into the cheap microphone plugged into his computer.
There’s boy Tony, bottle of Martinelli’s in hand, popping out like Mario in front of the Portland skyline (except instead of from a pipe, from a toaster, which could be interpreted as a metaphor for his former home of Glendale, Arizona) .
Using this sophisticated technological discovery, he began layering recordings of himself playing guitar and singing over MIDI songs he arranged with Cakewalk Express, afterwards burning the results to CDs and handing them out to his friends, who considerately said, "That's pretty good."
That teenager was me, and I soon chose the name "Toast" (inspired by the character on the WB cartoon, "Histeria!") to differentiate my ongoing musical project from others that have names.
In that same year, my parents moved up to Portland, Oregon. Considering the options open to us with regards to food and shelter, my younger siblings and I joined them.
While the anatomical correctness of the muscles in this self-portrait is highly questionable (both in relation to my own musculature and the universal design of human arms), the anatomical correctness of the teeth is on-point. I would also like to apologize for the offense to the sensibilities of all good graphic designers; I have since mended my ways, as you’ll see.
The songs I wrote at that time of my life, alongside the Alice Cooper covers, had a subtly psychedelic—but mostly unintentional—surrealism to them: there was the dream-like, grungy slow dance of “Foot Fetish;” there was the driving, aggressive, alt-metal storytelling of “Ballad of the Ace Hardware Guy;” and then there was the all-synth death metal assault (with a sampled saxophone solo included) of “Crazy Monkey Talk.” These, along with the old-school punk rocker “The Prom Song” (with which I asked my prom date to that fateful dance, perhaps a month ahead of time. The day before the event, she called me to say that her dad wasn’t very impressed with me, and thus she was forced to renege on her previous decision. This was one of the only times I ever heard of a girl’s parents objecting to me; as much as I tried to look the bad boy, I was actually the sort of boy that a girl was wise not to bring home if upsetting her parents was her intent) made up the Out of the Toaster EP.
Upon finishing high school, I felt that a more grown-up name would be fitting for my musical project. As such, I began calling it "Captain Thunderpants," after a super hero I'd created, who was named after a fictitious rock band on Angry Kid, so it was only halfway not creative.
In the spring of 2005, I found myself in a punk band.
Between creative differences on what style of punk we were going to play, my own internal impulse to try to convince my bandmates to do a Judas Priest cover, and our band taking the rather tasteless and insensitive name of “Vicious Rape,” I quickly remedied the fact of my presence in that band. A few months later I joined a metal band more tastefully called “White Lightning” at the request of Pete Sylvia who, a few months prior, having found himself in said punk band with me, quickly remedied that fact, too. (It should be said that Vicious Rape quickly remedied the fact of their existence as a band as well, one practice after my exit. Most of those guys went on to make much better music in more tastefully named bands.)
Somewhat older boy Tony, with White Lightning, at Brainstains, PDX, August 22, 2007. Also pictured are most of Pete Sylvia, as well as most of Andy Sylvia’s right arm.
Originally, White Lightning had started as a glam rock band, and I was going to be the rhythm guitarist, but after their vocalist and songwriter, Pete’s sister Jessica, opted not to commute from her new home in Hawai’i, I filled in for her. Both Pete and I had been getting into prog/power metal bands like Symphony X, Angra, Sonata Arctica, and Blind Guardian, as well as Marty Friedman and Jason Becker’s shred band, Cacophony, so White Lightning quickly began taking a similar shape.
We spent a year looking for a bass player, and eventually found one in Pete’s younger brother Andy. Along with founding member Matt Fitzgerald on drums, whom Pete also played with in local punk darlings Rejected Dead, we made four. For the following four years, we played the bar/all-ages venue/basement/living room scene, in Portland and along the near I-5 corridor, and we shared the stage with such bands as Last Empire, Hirax, Headless Pez, Metal Shakespeare Company, and even Edguy and Kamelot.
Meanwhile, my work as Captain Thunderpants was starting to sound much more polished than the bedroom rock it had started as.
In the fall of 2006 I started a two-year course in recording technology at Portland Community College, so that revolutionary recording method I’d developed three years prior (involving Microsoft Sound Recorder, a cheap microphone, and a lot of unwanted noise) was no longer useful to me. I’d stumbled upon a new method in late 2004 anyway, one involving actual recording software, but now I knew how to navigate the less-friendly—but much more useful—parts of CoolEdit’s FX menu.
Well, even if this is the highest resolution version of the album cover on my hard drives, I think most graphic designers could agree that it is much more presentable than the cover of Stop Giving Me CDs, Captain. Maybe not entirely professional (I’m not sure how I ended up having to crop it to make a perfect square, as opposed to starting with a square canvas…), but better.
Due to a lack of interest in being in school at the time, I would not take the second year of the recording tech course until the 2011-2012 school year, but its effects on my home recordings were especially apparent in the album I eventually finished in 2009, The Guitar That Played Itself. (By the time I finished it, though, I wasn’t in much of an emotional state to secure the mechanical license for my cover of Alice Cooper’s “Steven,” much less release and promote the album, unfortunately; but it sounded markedly better than anything I’d done before.)
My improved home recording skills also helped White Lightning produce an EP.
On the surface, things seemed to be looking up for White Lightning.
The cover artwork that should have been for Dr. Meanberger’s Sinister Plot! I drew this, in a fit of wistfulness, maybe a year after we originally released it. The original artwork can be found in the review by Métal Intégral, if you really want to see it. I don’t (the artwork, that is; I like looking at the review from time to time, though. It gives me a little glow of pride and, if not a boost of confidence, a slight diminishing of no-confidence).
In 2007 and 2008 we had played the Wormstock Festivals, and we had had opening slots or better at increasingly high-profile bands’ Portland tour stops (such as the aforementioned Kamelot and Edguy). In mid-2009, we recorded and released a three-song EP, Dr. Meanberger’s Sinister Plot!, which got even a little international attention. It got positive reviews from a few ezines, Métal Intégral being the one that sticks most in my memory.
But not all was as it seemed; although we’d seen large crowds at our shows, they were never consistent: it was hard to predict whether there’d be 14 or 400 people in the audience. Although we’d made a fine EP, I had no idea how to promote it, and while I could bluster through a lot of situations with pure, blind optimism, I wasn’t so dumb as to think that getting the CD professionally duplicated was going magically draw all the people who’d want it. The ones I’d made myself, packaged in little paper jackets with the artwork printed on, and priced at $5, hardly sold at all. Realistically, although Dr. Meanberger was more polished than my previous attempts at recording us, it was still pretty rough, and we knew it.
My DIY way, although I owned it, made it deliberate, and was proud of it, was nonetheless our only option, at the end of the day. If venues paid us at all at shows, it was peanuts, so we didn’t have any income, outside of our own meagre personal incomes, with which to fund our operations. I had once tried to negotiate a fee with a venue owner but, callow youth that I was, I failed to get it in writing, and we got bupkis out of it. Instead of learning from my mistake and figuring out how to write up an ironclad payment contract, though, I decided not to bother at all. I think even the venue owners with the best intentions still saw more opportunity with us than we’d have offered, if we knew better: the best we ever got of any evening’s take was leftovers.
After some traumatizing personal losses on top of all that, I was feeling pretty generally burnt out on life towards the end of 2009. I didn’t see things going anywhere with White Lightning, so, as much as I loved my band, I didn’t feel up to the challenge of learning some good business practices and skills; with no band income, I saw no way into a studio for a professional recording, and thus no pathway to getting signed and going pro. And honestly, with the sort of contract the lowest-hanging fruit among record labels had to offer, it’s a pretty safe bet that a bigger record label would simply have found more expensive ways to walk all over us. Maybe build a nice road on top of us and drive on it for a little bit.
Whether or not it was a good choice, I decided it was time to move on.
Closing that chapter of my life, I set aside the mantle of Captain Thunderpants, both proverbially and literally, and began operating under the name of “Tony Cordes,” which, although more sincere, was less creative, since my parents came up with it.
I did want to throw the proverbial spaghetti at a wall again and start another band, but I never quite found people who wanted to play my kind of music. The folks from the metal scene generally wanted to play black metal, thrash, or something derivative of Megadeth’s Killing is My Business… And Business is Good, which is all fine stuff, but I wanted to play something a bit further from the beaten path(s). The folks from outside the metal scene, if they were on board with my ideas, knew about as many people as I did who also were, and they usually made better friends than bandmates, for various reasons. That said, I made a few good friends who helped me keep my sanity while I sorted out my own struggles, so my search was not a total loss.
As myself, I produced quite a bit of music in the following years, much of which can actually be found on your favorite streaming platforms. Although The Guitar that Played Itself, at least lyrically, isn’t something I can entirely stand by today (which is why you won’t find it on the internet—although I do still like to listen to it from time to time, and might make it available if it ever makes sense to set up a fan club), just about everything that followed it is: BFD (Big Demo), the unreleased singles (including my cover of “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight,” which I won’t put on the streaming services until it becomes public domain in 2025 because I’m cheap like that), and the Toast and The Barrow Downs EPs.
…But Nothing is static.
And historically, the location of “home,” for me, has followed that trend. Through my childhood and early teens, the longest my family ever stayed in one house was four years. Although we did live in Buffalo Grove, Illinois until I was eight, after that, we lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Bogotá, Colombia, as well as Phoenix and Portland. My dad was a preacher, and some preachers’ families end up moving around a lot.
Likewise, it wasn’t long before Portland’s number was up for me, too. In 2014 I wanted a place of my own, and the only affordable housing for me, as a low-level mechanic, involved roommates. I’ve always been a bit of a neat freak, more so than the majority of roommates are, so that really didn’t work for me. Also, as I said, I was a low-level mechanic, and I didn’t want to do that forever; I had tried my hand as an intern at Cloud City Sound, but that never panned out. I had kind of given up on trying to find the personnel for another band, and the dating pool had dried up for me, too, so Portland really felt like a bit of a dead end to me.
My folks, at the time, lived in the town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, population 3,401 (as of 2019). While I wasn’t about to move back in with them for any longer than it took to find a place of my own, I did want a change of pace, some peace and quiet, and to be close to my family while I figured out what I was doing with my life. So Sleepy Eye it was: I packed my motorcycle, guitars, and all my worldly possessions into a 14’ moving van and drove there in August, 2014.
Sometimes peace and quiet are what a guy needs.
There’s even-older-boy Tony, hamming it up in his humble apartment in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota.
When I got to Sleepy Eye, I rented about half of the first story of a charming 19th century house, where I eventually started working on the first album I would officially release: The Hunt.
The Hunt is a synth-driven, mostly instrumental prog rock concept album about Metroid. It took a couple of years for it to crystallize, but when it did, it was something I was—and still am—very proud of. I’ve been told that some of my music is reminiscent of John Carpenter’s soundtracks (I would imagine that Escape from New York was what the commenter had in mind). The Hunt is where I worked on and brought out that element of my compositional voice.
The cover artwork for The Hunt, painted by my brother, Jesse Cordes.
Most of The Hunt was written in that old house in Sleepy Eye, where I lived for about fifteen months, but from which I eventually moved on account of an upstairs neighbor who liked shouting and stomping on the floor with his girlfriend, just above where my bed was situated, until anywhere from 1 to 3 in the morning, if I had to go to work that morning; who would grudgingly quiet down only briefly if asked to, and who would maybe give me a few weeks of respite if given a stern talking-to from the landlords. Sometimes paranoid daydreams do come true.
Even so, I like to think that the tall ceilings, beautiful woodwork, and somewhat darker-than-white walls helped inspiration along, because I did write a good deal of music there, but who knows? Maybe it was the sleep deprivation. I have a toddler, now, who often wakes my wife and me up much earlier than we mean to wake up, and I’ve been making a good deal of music lately, too.
While in Sleepy Eye, I did, indeed figure out what I was doing with my life.
The choreographed “Laurey’s Dream” sequence from Oklahoma! in which overgrown bully Curly (Adam Tecken, left) and misunderstood, but definitely, dangerously, creepily unstable farmhand Jud (myself) have it out over that uppity Laurey.
…Almost. Two of my younger sisters had started school at Bethany Lutheran College in nearby Mankato, and they were enjoying it quite a bit. After about a year of thinking about it, I decided I was going to follow suit.
My original plan was to major in psychology, with the goal of becoming a therapist, but a music scholarship was among the scholarships and grants that paid my tuition, so I was involved in the music department from the start, and decided in my first semester to declare music as my major. I fell in love with opera and, inspired by that and Blind Guardian’s Beyond the Red Mirror, found that my one of my dreams was to bring modern instruments to the orchestra (as opposed to bringing the orchestra to a modern metal band, which has been done deftly enough times). I’m still figuring that one out, but one day I will.
Sailing the high Cs with Petruccio in Kiss Me, Kate. (Sorry… blame it on the raging dad hormones…)
In my three years at Bethany I got involved in the theater and even had a couple of principal roles in the annual musicals (I played Jud Fry in Oklahoma! and Fred Graham/Petruccio in Kiss Me, Kate). I almost minored in philosophy, but I couldn’t see myself both keeping my absurd credit load of 21 per semester (and thus saving money and graduating after three years) and doing justice to Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, so I stuck with just a music major, focusing both on theory/composition and vocal performance, and graduated summa cum laude with my two youngest sisters. I also met my wife in those three years, and started Blue River Combo, a small jazz ensemble in which I would play bass and sing some leads until 2021.
The year is 20XX. Robots, arguably, do not rule the Earth.
After college, I left the farmhouse I lived at in the Courtland township and moved to Mankato, to live with my wife and ply my trade as a composer, musician, and recording artist. My music has had a little airtime on KMSU’s Keeping it Local, and I got my first commission in the summer of 2020, a piece for choir and orchestra to commemorate the 100th anniversary of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. I haven’t gone full-time yet, but who does? Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas do, as well as the gentlemen from Metallica, but they are exceptions and not the rule. Even so, a guy can’t be blamed for trying.
As you might infer from my website’s URL (see the top of your browser), I rebranded some time in the recent past. As Inire’s Mirrors I released the Electric Fugue EP, made mostly of songs I wrote and recorded during and after college. You heard something from it (or saw a video of me somewhere on this internet), and found this fine website. You then proceeded to read this long-winded diatribe about my late teens and adulthood thus far, and maybe even read all the way to the end without scrolling to the bottom of the page, first. (If you did scroll to the bottom of the page without reading, though, I understand. As with Severian, it is no easy road.)
Well, good for you, and thank you, if you’ve made it thus far.
You must like my music or something. If I had a mailing list of some sort, no doubt I would put a link right here for you to click if you felt inclined to join. Soon enough I will, but in the meantime, don’t be a stranger, alright? Those links down below should help you with that.