In listening to the AP stash this weekend, I crossed the halfway mark.

I also found the first recording of Andy that was painful to hear. It was a radio interview done the day “Carried Along” was released. Andy & the gang were great, but I wanted to strangle that female radio personality. She was obnoxious, annoying, had a terrible radio voice, and was trying to be much cooler than she really was. I’m really glad that recording is done. Hopefully, that’s the last of the unbearable recordings, and I can get back to the good stuff.

The moral of this story is that if you’re in the northern part of Florida, stick to the CD player. You’ll be glad you did.

A quick update on the Appendix A project I’ve been working on. I’ve listened to 39 of the 86 disks that came from Nashville. I’m totally done with CDs and DVDs and am moving on to the MDs and cassette tapes.

I’ve got my cassette deck at home ready to be hooked up to that sound board. The MD player is portable, so I am taking it pretty much everywhere with me so I can listen at work and in the car.

I hope to have the rest of the shows heard in the next 2 weeks. Some time between now and then, I’ll probably be chatting with Andy over ideas for what songs to use. Also, I’ll be checking in with him to make sure the direction he wants the project to head is the direction it goes.

Once I’ve heard (and made notes on) all of the recordings, I’ll get a list of songs for the CD and go back to pull them off of their original media into CD Audio format for Andy polish off with ProTools (or whatever software he uses).

I’ve heard a lot of good stuff. Some recordings were rough, but some are amazingly good. I think you’ll all enjoy the Appendix; I’ve definitely got a wealth of bootlegs to pull from. More later…

Since I’m doing recordings (kind of) in my basement “studio” (and I use that term loosely), I need a name for it. Some of my favorite CDs have been recorded in the basement of Andy Osenga’s home, which has been named “The Velvet Eagle.” I have no idea where he got the name, but I like it. In a pathetic attempt at naming my studio in honor of a much greater studio, I have dubbed my basement “The Velour Buzzard.” I chose this name for 2 reasons: it’s so much less of a studio than The Velvet Eagle, and I couldn’t think of a better name. And though I have no clue of the history of Osenga’s studio, maybe he’ll enlighten me one day.

Much thanks to Wulfgar, who was able to locate this spare sound board in almost no time at all. I’ll have some pictures once all the junk is moved to the other side of the “studio.”

We’re through 12 CDs now. I brought a stack to work with me today so I can get some listening done here. So far there has been about an even mix between good and bad recordings.

On the slate for today is:
2001 Christmas show in Nashville
2001 show with Randall Goodgame in Cassville, GA
2000 show with Randall Goodgame in Buford, GA
2001 show at Bryan College
2001 show with Eric Peters in Birmingham, AL
January 2005 show in Nashville.

So far, I’m through 6 of these CDs and have found a good bit of stuff that might be able to be used on the final CD. One instance of amnesia throughout “Love Enough” had me literally laughing out loud. Some of these are hard to listen to (because of recording quality), but it’s definitely fun listening back to the early years and hearing the original trio (AP, Jamie, Gabe) and some fun moments from way back then.

My church has a small sound board that remains unused (and apparently buried somewhere). I’m going to attempt to find it and setup a small studio in the basement for pulling this stuff off of MD and cassette to put into wav format. I won’t be able to start digging for that sound board until next week sometime, but that should give me a good 7 days or so to get the rest of this music listened to.

I sped home yesterday anxiously looking forward to digging through the package that had been waiting on me. Yes, I know I’ll be spending many hours listening through these recordings, but you’ve got to remember that I’m not just a friend of Andy, I’m a huge fan of his music. And in my home, waiting for me to release it from its cardboard prison was a decade of old recordings and interviews collected by Andy and his fans. I’ll get my chance to enjoy each of these, but mostly I just wanted to sit in awe of the collection for a little while.

I took pictures. Yes, really. I figured if Andrew Osenga can put pictures on his blog, so can I.

Here are the recordings, still in the box, as I first saw them.

Then I pulled them out of the box and spread them out, so that they would make for a more impressive picture. There were 39 MDs in the lot. 39! With all of the MDs, CDs, DVDs, and those things called “cassette tapes”, there was a total of 86 recordings.

Since my hands are big enough to hold 39 MDs, I took this picture. I don’t know what’s more impressive - that there were 39 MDs or that my hand could hold them.

After I finished sitting in awe of this massive bootleg collection, I set out to find some way of organizing it. I definitely don’t want to be sitting in my soon-to-be studio at home thinking “where was that good version of ‘Love Enough’?” So I created a database. Yes, I’m a geek. I logged each recording, date, city, state, venue, etc., and assigned each disk a recording identification number. Then I pulled out my trusty red Sharpie and wrote the recording ID on each disk.

As I listen to each recording, I’ll be logging the set lists in 2 places: first in the database (for searching) and second in my nifty composition notebook (since I won’t always have my laptop handy when listening to this stuff).

So far, I’m about half way through recording #19, Andy’s college demo tape, recorded circa 1996 in an apartment at Florida Christian College. …talk about old school.

I got an email last Thursday from Andrew Peterson asking me to lend a hand with a project he’s not had time to do. It’s something he’s wanted to do for some time and finally has the freedom to do it.

There is quite an extensive collection of bootlegged concerts that has been built over the past decade. Earlier this year, Andy asked fans to send him their bootlegs so that he could pull the “best of” moments to be compiled into a “Live (Almost)” CD. Then Andy decided that he’d like to release something like this every few years, so he changed the working name to “Appendix A” (to allow for B-Z).

With a new full release CD coming out at the end of the summer, a kids’ CD planned, DVD of the most amazing Christmas program ever, and some other stuff on his plate, Andy asked me to help him out by listening through these bootlegs and pulling out the really good moments.

Since I have a blog, and since I really don’t have anything else to do with it, I’m going to post updates on the project here. I figure there’s no way I can mess it up if the whole internet community is holding me accountable. …right? (Andy, if you’re reading this, I’m just joking about messing things up.)

I have been told that our “femail man” (female mail carrier) delivered the package this afternoon. I’ll post more later after I see what is waiting for me inside that box.