The thought of releasing these recordings conjures varied feelings: a sense of exhilaration at preserving our earliest attempts at making songs as Over the Rhine, memories of that incredible insomnia (call it what you will), apprehension at letting rough mixes venture forth like children to develop lives of their own--WE NEVER INTENDED...

The first seven songs were recorded the summer of '89 in Tim's basement/garage on his mysterious 8 track. As far as we were concerned it was Montserrat. From 'If I'm Drowning' on, we borrowed an oversized Sunday School room in Oakley and recorded using an Akai 12 (!) track which we purchased second-hand with pooled and unusually limited resources. It was the summer of 1990. We were ripping handfuls of pages from post-adolescent memoirs and calling it music; post-nuclear, pseudo-alternative, folk-tinged art-pop tp be exact. The defects in this initial body of work are ample, but (in the words of Aldous Huxley) "resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else." For example, we exist. We're alive. We could meet someday. What else really matters?