One summer's day in 2003 (or more accurately, some time between January and December, because it was Phoenix), a BOY IN HIS MID-TEENS discovered that he could use that Sound Recorder application that came with Windows to record what came out of his computer speakers, as well as what went into the cheap microphone plugged into his computer.
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 cartoon show "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.
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” (which, roughly a decade later, would evolve into "Sea Monkeys from R'lyeh"). These, along with the scuzzy, 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, if you'll allow a brief digression, she called me to say that her dad wasn’t very impressed with me, and thus she was forced to renege on our previous agreement. 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, girlfriends' parents typically thought well of me—which did no favors to my sex appeal, if those girlfriends were of the goth/punk cut that I was interested in. Now while I was no George Michael Bluth in my baggy, worn-out hand-me-downs and my obsession with Alice Cooper, Spawn, and fantasy RPGs, nobody was confusing me with James Dean, either)—these songs made up the above-pictured 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. With the name change came further metamorphosis: the Nirvana influence started falling away as I started delving into Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (as well as their more abrasively post-punk predecessor, The Birthday Party), Scorpions, and much of what I'd be listening to as I started playing in bands with other people. Because...
before long, my schoolmate Eli and I started a punk band.
It was fun, but it was short-lived; the other members and I couldn't decide if we wanted to sound like GBH or Cheap Sex (the guitarist's preferences), GG Allin (Eli the bass player/co-songwriter's preferences), or somewhere between The Stooges and Iron Maiden (mine; and the drummer, cool-headed fellow that he was, was just along for the ride). Our band's name was in rather poor taste, too, and while being edgy was what you did as a teenage boy (and I was a bit of an edgelord, if I'm being honest), a name like "Vicious Rape" left a foul taste in my mouth, even when I tried to spin it as a metaphor (and what does a middle-class suburbanite teenager know about being "raped" by The System? It would be another six years before I began my regular occupational exposure to asbestos). We wrote four songs, played one justifiably underattended set at the soon-to-close Solid State, and called it quits in about two months. Several months after that, Pete Sylvia, the drummer from this unfortunately-named band, asked me to join his other band, White Lightning (in which he was the lead guitarist).
Originally, White Lightning had started as a glam rock band, fronted by Pete's older sister, but she moved to Hawaii, so I took over on the vocal detail. Pete and I were both getting into prog/power metal like Angra, Symphony X, and Sonata Arctica, so the songs we started writing took a similar shape. For the following four years, we played the bar/all-ages venue/basement/living room scene, mostly in Portland, but up and down the near I-5 corridor, too (Burial Grounds in Salem was always a fun time).
White Lightning was pretty well-received, when we got our footing, and we shared the stage with such bands as Hirax, Headless Pez, Last Empire, Thrones (at least as far as can I remember; Joe Preston was also playing bass for Last Empire back then, and I'm pretty sure I remember him headlining an all-local show we played one time. It was a minute ago, though, and I used to drink myself silly, between our straightedge drummer's spare drink tickets and my own pocket change, so memory is a bit less reliable than memory already tends to be on some details) and even Edguy and Kamelot, towards the end. We got to play the Wormstock festival in 2007 and 2008, as well. This was, indeed, where I cut my teeth as a performer.
Meanwhile, my work as Captain Thunderpants was starting to sound like a more polished sort of bedroom rock.
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 CPU fan crosstalk) 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 effects menu.
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 was recovering from a painful, volatile relationship that I'd recently left, and had also made the dubious move of quitting White Lightning, so 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; but it sounded markedly better than anything I’d done before.
Despite our growth as a band, White Lightning's days were numbered.
While we sounded polished enough on stage to land slots at the aforementioned Wormstock festival and get on the bill when Kamelot and Edguy came through town, we were slowing down internally. In mid-2009, though we recorded and released a three-song EP, Dr. Meanberger’s Sinister Plot! (which got even a little international attention in the form of positive reviews from a few ezines—Métal Intégral being the one that sticks most in my memory), I was not much of a businessman back then, and I think we only sold one EP.
My promotional skills were limited enough that, even with our credibility being what it was, there was no way of knowing if there would be four hundred or just four people coming to one of our shows; in our last year as a band, we had seen both. 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 any further with White Lightning, so, as much as I loved my band, I decided it was time to move on.
Closing that chapter of my life, I set aside the mantle of "Captain Thunderpants."
I tried a few different names for this new era of my solo project, but it was not until 2022 that I settled on "Inire's Mirrors." In the mean time, I made the very uncreative choice to operate under the name I was born with.
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, which is all fine stuff, but I wanted to play something even further from the beaten path(s). The folks from outside the metal scene, if they were on board with my ideas at all, knew about as many people as I did who also were, and they usually made better friends than bandmates, for various reasons. With that said, though, at least I made a few good friends; they were the ones who helped me keep my sanity while I sorted out my own struggles. My search was not a total loss.
As myself, I produced quite a bit of music in the following years, most of which can be found on your favorite streaming platform (I hope it's Qobuz, though, because they pay significantly more per stream than the other platforms, but you do you, my friend). 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), the Toast and Barrow Downs EPs have been on Bandcamp since 2012 and 2014, respectively, and I eventually brought their mixes up to my present standards, mastered them, and merged them into the Toast on the Barrow Downs album (along with tracks "The Wicked Wizard of Wooton Major," and my cover of Tiny Tim's "Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight").
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 lowly 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 mechanic, and I didn’t want to do that forever; I had tried my hand as an intern at Cloud City Sound recording studio, but that never panned out. I had pretty much given up on trying to find the personnel for another band, and the dating pool had dried up for me, too; so Portland, though I'd come to love the city, felt like a dead end for me.
My folks, at the time, lived in the town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota (population ~3000). 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 a fellow just needs some peace and quiet.
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 was where I honed that sensibility.
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 a middle-aged upstairs neighbor whose after-hours schedule (but only if I had to go to work the next morning) consisted of drinking with his girlfriend until the conversations were mostly shouted, punctuated with laughing and stomping on the floor directly above my bedroom, from about 7PM to 3AM; 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. Those walls and floors were not insulated, and as such transmitted sound beautifully. For me, half the reason why The Hunt was instrumental was out of consideration for my neighbors, both above, below, and next to me. I could program synthesizers and record guitar parts with headphones on; vocals were the only element that could not be consistently quiet—as much as I love Elliott Smith's music, I rarely find occasion to style my vocals like his.
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 small children, now, who often wake my wife and me 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.
...Almost. Two of my younger sisters had started school at Bethany Lutheran College and were enjoying it quite a bit. After thinking about it, I decided that going back to school was what I needed, too.
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, Blind Guardian’s Beyond the Red Mirror, and twentieth century composers like Shostakovitch, Prokofiev, and Penderecki, I found some new direction for my music, and began dreaming of having a full orchestra, alongside synthesizers, guitars, and drums, playing my compositions.
In my three years at Bethany I rediscovered my love for theater (I had done quite a bit of it in high school, but hadn't done any since), and even had a couple of principal roles in the annual musicals: 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 fellow 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 Electric Fugue, made mostly of songs I wrote and recorded during and in the two years after college. I've been releasing singles since then, a remix/remaster of The Hunt, and a long-overdue combination (with the requisite update of mixes) of my first two EPs into Toast on the Barrow Downs. You heard some of this music (or saw a video of me somewhere on this internet), and found this fine website. You then proceeded to read this long-winded, probably self-indulgent 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, the narrator of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, it is no easy road.)
thank you, and also good for you, if you've made it this far.
You must like my music, or at least my prose, to have read thus far. If you would like more prose about music and other slightly unhinged ramblings, as well as the occasional merchandise drop, delivered to your inbox, on a not-at-all spamming schedule (I unsubscribe from the mailing lists even of brands I like, if they exceed two emails a week, to give you an idea of what I consider "spam"), please enter your email address below.
