People ask when I'm going to finish my old songs. I've asked myself too. But the older I get, the more I realise you can't "finish" the past — you can only return to it with clearer eyes.
These recordings, from December 2009 onwards, carry too much soul memory to overwrite. They're time-stamped versions of me: the boy alone with GarageBand, the young man trying to stay alive in the noise, the quieter selves I abandoned or forgot, the selves that carried me without me knowing.
They're inconsistent, imperfect, unbalanced. Some are only half-built — a verse, a chorus, a moment of clarity before the fog returned.
Some were recorded through earphones because I didn't have the strength to set up anything else. But that's the point. They weren't made for polish. They were made so I could tell the truth when I had no other language for it.
I used to think I'd remake them all one day — fix them, shape them, lift them to some imagined standard. But when I listen back now, I hear something else: the psyche unfolding in real time. The shadow showing its face. The beginning of the long walk back to myself.
Jung wrote that the soul leaves clues for the future self — little fragments scattered along the way, waiting to be recognised. That's what these songs are. Versions of me I didn't yet understand, trying to speak to the man I would become.
I've lived enough lives to know that identity isn't linear. It fractures, wanders, goes quiet. Sometimes it hides inside an old demo you forgot you wrote at 3am.
This project is me gathering those selves back together — integrating the echoes, the ghosts, the unfinished sentences.
The songs in the archive are complete to me, even if they're uneven. I've trimmed a few to fit the reel limit, but the essence is untouched. The photos are from the same years — the same rooms, the same streets, the same versions of me. Putting this together has felt like opening a sealed box of old dreams.
This might not be the end of their story — but that's for later. For now, I'm putting the whole history in order, so the next version of myself has somewhere solid to begin.
— J