Tarps & Blankets is a big mess of 50 cover songs I and a slew of friends have recorded for Stir Up Your Grey Matter bands/projects and which have (mostly) never been released anywhere.

2016 marks 15 years of my releasing music under the Stir Up label (starting with hand-dubbed cassettes, later CD-Rs, and since 2010, via Bandcamp). Some of the recordings here, however, span all the way back to 1997, which, if you're doing the math, you'll realize is more than 15 years ago. Digging through boxes of four-track-recorded tapes to digitize and compile this thing, I found a few surprises in songs I'd forgotten existed and learned a few things.

1. I really have some great friends who are willing to put themselves out there to make some occasionally really grating noise with me.

2. Doing some of these releases to drum up interest for recent and upcoming Farewell Scalar recordings, I can now see it would've been downright logical to shorten the Bandcamp URL to simply stirup.bandcamp.com rather than stirupyourgreymatter.bandcamp.blahblahblahblah.com.

3. As a teenager, I was apparently shiftless (that's probably the most generous way to put it) enough to ask a girl I had a big crush on to come to my band practice to record her breathing to the beat of a song in which I repeatedly sang "I love you."

4. When Eddie Dirtnap and I first went splitsies to buy a four-track recorder freshman year of high school, all I did was learn Pink Floyd songs and record them. And make mix tapes of these recordings to give to the above-mentioned girl.

5. I also apparently have a thing for The Pixies, Spacemen 3, Neil Young, King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, and Radiohead whose songs all appear at least twice but as many as four times. None, however, beat Floyd/Syd Barrett's five appearances on the comp. And I didn't even include my nearly complete acoustic recreation of The Final Cut or my 24-minute version of "Echoes" performed on Casio keyboard.

6. I have many, many recordings of my first band. This band was originally called The Inconsistent Jibberish, but Eddie Dirtnap, the lead songwritter and decision maker, and I argued over whether or not gibberish was indeed spelled with a J so much that we changed to Karp with a K (on purpose). In college, I would learn that there is already a punk band named Karp with a K.

7. Like seriously, there are so many Karp/Inconsistent Jibberish tapes in my basement! I'm going to California next week to see Eddie and his brother Stevert Enson (Karp drummer) for Eddie's bachelor party. Gonna surprise them with a CD-R worth of awkward teenage glory. Each song is introduced by some conversation I caught one day after practice while we watched a rerun of Mad About You. We're fifteen. So there are a lot of really stupid sex jokes.

There are surprisingly few Paul Reiser gifs out there.

8. I can't believe I've never recorded a Billy Joel cover! So I've decided it's time to get on that. I'm thinking a track-by-track recreation of The Nylon Curtain. That'd be cool. That'd be real cool.

9. I had no idea what you are supposed to do with your mouth or throat or air or anything when it comes to singing until I was maybe 28. And now that I do know what to do, I still don't know how to do it.

I searched "can't sing" on Giphy.com. It was mostly Miley Cyrus gifs. That's cold.

10. When I originally started talking about compiling this thing back in 2007, my best-man, friend for life, guy who officiated at my wedding, bandmate Jeff/Dr. Kamikaze informed me that he did not in fact write the words for "Don Santa Grants Rudolph His Wish," a piece we performed as The Knights Who Say Ni! in 2000 (due to some revisionist history now credited to Dr. Kamikaze and the $35 Sound). Only then did I find out this was in fact a Mark Mothersbaugh (of Devo fame) piece set to music the band improvised. My best-man, friend for life, guy who officiated at my wedding, bandmate: big liar. Our bass player served cookies with whipped cream and poured dixie cups of milk for the audience during this piece.

Anyway, if you want 50 cover songs of vastly varying quality check out Tarps & Blankets and celebrate 15 years of getting some tape-hiss-filled music out into the world!

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Casey Bye

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10 Things I Learned While Compiling Tarps & Blankets