It was the winter of 2003, and I was home visiting with my two best friends, Buster and Donny. They had written a few of these songs already, the first of which was “McDonald’s.” When I chipped in, we began recording and in a matter of days, we had all of these songs completed. When I say completed, what I actually mean is we had thrown a bunch of sounds together with very minimal effort, written and recorded some humorous (at least we thought so at the time) lyrics, and somehow found a way to burn it onto CDs. The Life of a Slinky was our testament to the world that with a little technology and know-how, anyone could record and release an album. We were trendsetters in this regard, as this is even more true now. But we were, in our minds, the first. And also the worst. We were BAD.

It was a year after The Life of a Slinky. I had returned with songs I had written while away. We spent a few weeks recording all of these songs, now with a cool drum machine that Buster borrowed from his uncle or something. We had all sent each other lyrics and song ideas back and forth through our Yahoo! and Hotmail email accounts. In our minds, we were crafting a very BAD masterpiece. We spent days recording, again making intolerable noises to serve as the backdrop to our nonsensical lyrics. We even had another one of our close friends, who actually had musical talent, play piano on a couple of the songs. We had a tribute song for one of our high school friends who we’d lost in a car accident a few years prior. Too Bad for Explanation was a testament to our tenacity, and served as a link between three friends separated by the early years of adulthood.

In January of 2007, I was moving from Japan to the U.S. The three of us spent most of 2006 sending beats and lyrics back and forth to each other over the course of the year in anticipation of this album. All of this work culminated in one week at the beginning of January. We spent almost every hour of that week recording this album. To us, it was something magical. The energy we put into, our enthusiasm, our camaraderie. The 26 tracks on Loserville Park represented everything we wanted to say, from our typical ridiculous humor to the occasional more humorous topics. We layered each song with inside jokes and references. It was beautiful. But it was still BAD.

I returned to Tennessee in the summer of 2011. Buster and I immediately decided we wanted to work on something new, topically different from BAD, and a little more listenable. But we were both very busy by this point, having become full-grown real-life adults with our own problems and responsibilities. As a result, this album, which actually qualifies as an EP, took longer to make than any of our previous efforts. We put it under the name Aimless/Intellect because Donny had decided he didn’t want to record anymore, and we still felt like we had something to say. We wrote and recorded these songs over a four-year period. On this album, we have what we both consider to be our best song, our magnum opus, in “Negative Space.” We also have “Mix & Mitch,” a commentary on religion, the beat of which we use as the intro and outro to most of our in.pencil videos and podcasts.

In a very unfortunate turn of events, Donny passed away from ALS in January 2020. In August 2022, I was returning from a few years of working abroad. The remaining two of us began discussing how to handle all of the old unused demos we had recorded over the course of the past 20 years. We tossed some ideas around and ripped most of the acapella tracks off of old cassettes from the Slinkyand Too Bad days. As anyone who’s followed us over the years will know, we are not the best producers. But we set out to build a compilation of these old recordings and make something new with them. We made some new beats. I outsourced a few of the beats from producers I found online. We mixed everything together and within a few short months, we had the final BAD album. This album is a tribute not only to Donny but also to ourselves and our friendship. It contains a guest verse from another close friend of mine, who I’ve lovingly called Glenndizzle over the past twenty years on the song “Hip-Hop Hick Pt. 3.” He also voiced the opening and closing skits along with a significant portion of the outro section of Loserville Park. This album is the only project we’ve had professionally manufactured into physical CDs. It contains bits and pieces from all of our twenty years of recording together, and they serve as monuments to our friendship. Very BAD sounding monuments, but monuments nonetheless.