In August 2004 I had my wisdom teeth removed. I took drugs to numb the pain. I could only eat squishy foods. My benevolent parents decided to rent me a bunch of movies, as I was couch-ridden.
One of these films was Tommy, the 1975 film production of the classic Who album that came out 6 years earlier. I had some experience with several Who songs, most notably the famous radio ones and my one or two listenings of my dad's Who's Next LP. This was something new, though, something I had never heard before. A rock opera, an entire story set to song. No talking, just music. Several segments of Tommy really inspired me to do some songwriting.
As I was just about to start my senior year of high school, I was thinking about what I was going to do for my Senior Quest, which is this huge academic undertaking that combines a paper, a project, and a presentation, with a slew of other minor aspects. My focus was going to be on the project, and my paper and presentation would be a byproduct of the project (the opposite of the way most of my peers went about it). When I was in middle school, I went with my brother to the high school to watch a film that a student had made for their senior quest project. Now at the time I was primarily wanting to be a filmmaker, and this really inspired me to make my own film when I got to that point.
After the heavy bits of Tommy influence, I decided that I would film a rock opera! Realizing the sort of resources I would have available, I set about making a screenplay with lyrics, and spent 5 months composing the (at the time) 37 minute long piece, although I was originally hoping for a 60 minute opus. By the time I finished in January 2005, the preliminary phase of the senior quest had begun to take shape, and I went to work on a paper that would make my project make sense.
I ran into so many problems, mostly logistical. There was no way I could make a film, so after a couple of months I dropped that aspect and concentrated solely on a sound recording. While I had very feeble studio equipment (which was limited to a $20 Radio Shack mic) I managed to record all my drum parts, and went to my school every day during Career Week (which seniors had off so they could work on their projects) to record the piano parts, hand by hand. After I put it all together, I realized that nothing worked. With less than a month to go, I just scrapped the recording aspect and turned the Midi in (which still yielded me an easy A).
To make my mischievious treachery more apparent, I was also taking an Electronic Music course at Clackamas Community College during this time to get an early start on my Music Technology Certification Program. The final term in this was open ended, we had to develop an electronic music project that could be anything made digitally. I had been working on some ideas through the term, but upon my friend Larry's suggestion, I scrapped all those ideas and turn in my Midi of Off the Spring as my project, and got an A in the class.
And the project sat on the shelf for several years. I attempted another rock opera that fall, but only managed a few songs (Off the Spring wasn't even my first attempt, I had an 18 minute opera I had worked on when I was 15 that was never finished). I continued heavy songwriting though.
During spring of 2007 I had begun building up my home studio. I never really did much with this humble studio, aside from recording myself and a couple of recordings with my band(s). I wanted to do something. I'm not sure what impelled me to think of this, but around December 2007 the good idea hit me to finally record Off the Spring and release it as it was intended (minus the film aspect). It took me two weeks to lay down the drums in February 2008, but I was hit with a slew of problems, almost all of them dealing with the flaky musicians of Portland. After putting the project on hold for months, I eventually settled on buying my own bass and doing it myself. Even with that I still had trouble finding rhythm guitarists and pianists for months on end, I actually didn't find any personnel to record with until that December. To put further salt on the wound, after spending several months recording a pianist and lead guitarist, I had to dump them for continuing to flake out on me (and for having sub-standard gear; you can still hear the out-of-tune piano in some sections) and finally managed to finish recording in July 2009, 17 months after starting the recording process and 4 and a half years after finishing the writing aspect.
It is now done!