Why exactly I began any of this at all I now can’t remember. There was no band and no plan, just a few buddies and a studio date.

EP

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We recorded this EP over a three-day period in the summer of 2000. These were my first sessions as leader, and I was just out of high school.

I had persuaded my summer-job boss, Bob Veatch, to finance the whole thing. I remember sitting on his porch in the Douglas County evening banging out a few of my songs on guitar hoping to impress him. I wanted to properly record them and already had a studio in mind. I asked him for a loan and couldn’t believe it when he agreed.

After that I rounded up some buddies I’d been playing around town with. We had a little bit of rehearsal time in someone’s living room before we headed out, but it’s mostly just thrown together in the studio. A day to set up, two days to record. We billed ourselves Brian Barlowe and the Carroll County Flyers.

That’s how I remember it anyway, and certainly how the recording sounds to me now: buddies in a big studio, no single, no direction, and no two songs having anything to do with each other.

It’s just as well that the title of the EP ended up being a comment on all this. Even the off-the-cuff, blurry photo of my very young parents: What’s just out of frame? Why does my mom grip his wrist like that? The car is cool, Dad, but why the cut-off shorts? More about moment and opportunity than content. Because everyone already knows everyone knows all that. ‘And all the et ceteras’ would be simply a tip of the hat.

One of the suprises here turned out to be Zac Brown. He and I were good friends back then. We used to write and play together, especially around Carrollton and Atlanta (I spent a week with him in Panama City one spring break and everything gets feverish and disjointed after my third plastic cup of what he called ‘hunch punch’ on the first day). I had brought him along to my vocal session for The Letter, Sacred Crime, and She Who Waits for Me. I tried (unsuccessfully) to sleep on his couch the night before and had full-blown bronchitis by the morning. My voice didn’t sound like anything (here as the “alternate mixes”), so he did a few takes of The Letter and She Who Waits for Me. Those, obviously, made it to the CD (there was no hope for Sacred Crime, since it was in Spanish, and Zac couldn’t make heads or tails of it). Standing in the control room, I knew I was hearing something special, but the material got too much in the way. I figured he’d achieve something, but wasn’t thinking of Grammys and platinum records.

And all the et ceteras is over 20 years ago now. It’s funny to think how nothing ever came of it. We even did physical CDs, all in clear plastic jewel cases and full-color booklets. Must have ordered 200 of them. It was way too many and way too expensive. By the time they arrived, I was too busy working to properly support the album. No management, etc. I sold almost none and gave away dozens. The rest I hauled from apartment to apartment, house to house, for years, finally dumping all but a handful when I moved to Berlin.

And all the et ceteras is one of the things that can happen when you make music just for the love of doing it.

But you already knew that, etc.

~Barlowe, Berlin 2024

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