In September I drove up to Massachusetts and stayed on my friend's floor for a few months. I'd work temp jobs by day and play music at night whenever I could. I hit just about every open mic I could find. And these were way better open mics. Really talented performers... great singers... great instrumentalists. It was exciting and inspiring.

By this time I'd worked up a fairly decent acoustic act. In fact, just as I moved to Boston, I won the first round of WPBZ (the Buzz) Battle of the Bands as a solo acoustic act. I didn't win finals in part because I had an onstage altercation with an angry audience member... completely bizarro.

I needed to record an acoustic demo to try to get gigs around town. But I couldn't really record them in my friend's apartment without possibly upsetting the neighbors. Luckily I had a battery-powered 4-track cassette recorder. I took it, a microphone, my headphones and my acoustic guitar out and stood by the Charles River and recorded a few tracks.

I played my first real gig at the Kendall Cafe in Cambridge. It was the spot of my favorite open mic night, where I'd met many great performers including drummer Chris Harris and singer/keyboardist Leon Rich. Eric Marcos, who ran the open mic, liked my stuff well enough to set me up with a feature spot. It was pretty cool. But again... I really wanted to play in a band.

So I convinced Harris and Rich (who switched to bass) to play with me at some shows. We had a pretty stripped-down sort of acoustic thing going which was pretty cool. I wanted to record this group and use that to try to get some radio play, etc.

We went to Porter Square Recording in the summer of 1998 and did the bass, drums and guitars live. Then I went back and sang and doubled some guitar parts. It was really quick and really cheap. Rob Ignazio did a good job of recording everything quickly.

Although the heat in his apartment studio was pretty unbelievable. In fact, one of the ADAT tapes actually melted to the heads of his machine destroying the intro to the second (and at the time I thought superior) take of "We Could Be Alone." Luckily the first take still worked.

Geoff Neri, who had played a show or two with us on keys, came in and did his parts as well and whamolama we had an ep!

I had 500 made and pushed them on as many people as I could. People dug it. Especially the title track which was a novelty tune I wrote about a disastrous dating misadventure of a friend.

"Pay You Back" received good reviews and started getting radio play. I was even asked to be in WBCN's Rock'n'Roll Rumble (which I had to decline as I worked for sister station WZLX at the time).

One of the songs was even chosen by Big Girl Records to be on their charity compilation "Can You Read This Boston" which won a Boston Music Award. My track from that album was receiving regular radio play on a couple different college stations around town. Almost every morning I could hear my songs on the radio which blew me away.

Basically everything that I wanted to happen, was happening really quickly. Except for the band part.

Unfortunately, I couldn't hold the band together. The players had other bands or priorities and I couldn't find another solid group. I tried to keep it together for a while with some guys Leon Rich knew. But that fizzled out fairly quickly. Chris Harris ended up moving to San Francisco for a while. Although I ended up meeting bassist Kevin Quinn at work, and he and I tried to get another group together with various fill-in drummers (including a gig with producer/guitarist Pete Weiss on drums).

But it wasn't until Chris came back from San Francisco, that the band started back up again for real. And since then we've done a couple albums and played fairly regularly around Boston.

Although I've done better recordings since this EP and written better songs in my life, this album will always remind me of that exciting first year of living in Boston. A time when I met some great people, played some cool shows and tasted what it was like being part of a scene as cool as Boston.