Celebrate Good Times, Come On! It's a CelebrOOWWWWW MY EARS

I'm sorry to inflict this sort of cruel punishment on you, but I have to celebrate right now. Back when I was a music major, we had this weekly performance hour on Thursdays (called Promenade). Depending on your specific major/concentration, you had to perform once or twice a year for credit. Somehow, I always ended up performing on the same week every year (first week in April). (If ever I decide to post it, there's an interesting little story that goes along with this. We'll see, maybe later.)

Anyway, this particular week that I was performing, I did a piece called Luke Havergal by... I forget. I'll look it up and keep you updated. But anywho, I was first on, and my performance was... meh. This was back when I was still a nervous performer who didn't particularly like his vocal professor and had nothing but negative thoughts about his own abilities. The truth of the matter is, the recording IS pretty terrible, that hasn't changed at all. I flub a few notes, I miss at least one entrance, the diction is pretty mushmouthy, I don't project well enough, there's just a lot wrong here altogether.

Following the performance, I took the master recording (one of the perks of working stage crew... although it would have been preferred if I didn't have to work stage crew on the day I was performing, thank you very much) and made a copy of the CD. But I didn't do this so I could hear my own performance, no no. David Wert, a good friend of mine, did a vibraphone duet with (insert second person's name here... I need to look this stuff up somewhere) that I really enjoyed. I made a copy of the disk, returned the original, and that was the end of that for a while.

There was a slight problem... I had forgotten what I had done with the disk. In fact, I had completely forgotten that I had even made the copy. At the time that this was all taking place, I was in the middle of swapping out one crappy Dell computer for another (I could go into long details about the fight that occurred, but suffice it to say that it all boils down to the biggest oxymoron around anymore: Customer Service). I managed to keep my old hard drive, and for whatever reason, made the copy using the software on it, rather than the new hard drive. However, while recalling these events, I had myself convinced that I simply ripped my piece and Dave's onto the old hard drive, and forgot to transfer it over with all of the other old files.

Since about that time, the old hard drive remained wrapped in a static-free cloth bag of sorts, with some extra padding around it inside a plastic bag. For months, I kept telling myself that I needed to find a way to transfer the song from the old hard drive to the new one, but never really got around to it. Also, I lacked the means to transfer much more than 4GB, because at the time, I was limited to either using re-recordable DVD's or a flash drive. I made several DVD transfers at the time my new computer arrived, but couldn't figure out why I never transferred the song.

This changed recently, when I bought myself a new 320GB hard drive, and I realized that the reason I was never able to transfer directly from one old hard drive to the other (sorry for the confusion with all of these hard drives) was that I had the power cable hooked up to both, but still only had one data cable. Upon a little beg/borrow/stealing from good friend Steven Gustafson, I had meself a new used data cable, and all that was left was finding the time to do the transfer.

That all happened tonight. Sensing a bit of free time on my hands, I grabbed the old old hard drive, popped open the side of my tower, and started to dig in. Much to my dismay, I couldn't find the file that (I thought) I had ripped from the disk. I spent about 50 minutes trying to run searches for "*.mp3" between 4/1/08 and 4/18/08, but nothing came up. It wasn't until late in the night when I tried to recall the events of when I first borrowed the master copy, and I realized that I might not have ripped the songs at all. Luckily, I found my spindle of used-but-unmarked CD's and DVD's, went through the CD's in the stack, and bingo, EPIC WIN.

So to celebrate me finding Dave's performance, which I have now listened to several times while writing this, I thought I'd upload something completely different. Yes, Luke Havergal. Aren't I swell?

Luke Havergal sound bite

Luke Havergal
Baritone(ish): Stephen Lewis
Piano: Kristina Moritz
Recorded April 3, 2008