This is a fairly eclectic compilation of demos that I wrote between February of 2019 and March of 2021 with the bulk of them written during 2020. At the time, I was writing for the "Almagest EP" and constantly looking for that "last track" of a 4-5 song EP to tie it all together. Months passed. I continued to write, incessantly shifting around songs in hopes that I would find the right sequence of notes to perfect the EP. Those notes never came... or if they did, they did not work in the grand scheme of the album I was trying to write.

I continued to write and eventually realized that I had enough time and demos to craft an entire album. The songs I completed became MBIII, and I was left with about 20 demos of extra material cataloguing the last couple of years. These are not the entirety of the songs but trust that they are the most refined and most well composed of the bunch.

As is the nature of a demo, these songs are intentionally far from perfect; there are a lot of repetitive ideas, a lot of songs with similar structures. I also have a problem with "polishing" demos too far. Sometimes you lose the magic from demo to final track. I learned from Hemingway in that regard; Hemingway would always stop writing a scene in the middle of a section that he already knew how it would end... So when he picked it up the next morning, he would have momentum on his side. I'm kinda this way with music. With many of these songs, I can hear the missing parts, the pieces that haven't quite come together. And if I make my way back to them, I'll be certain to use that momentum to complete the track as it deserves.

Overall, this collection gives a good indication of where my head was at for the time directly leading up to (and into) the pandemic. I think it's also a window into how a musician evolves over the course of a few years, trying new things, going back to old tricks, picking up a few new ones along the way. Ultimately not shifting too far from the influences that made them create music.

I'm not sure if any of these songs will ever coalesce into something greater than this demo album. I upload them here because, frankly, hard drives sometimes blow up, and I've lost a lot of material over the years assuming mechanical parts won't break down. Also, when I was young and ingesting music interminably, whenever one of my favorite bands or artists would release a box set or a bonus disc with demos and extra tracks, I always found something that gave me a different perspective on that artist. Sometimes some of my favorite tracks were hidden in the discarded, half-executed songs that, for whatever reason, never made it to the next stage.

When I am writing the next MB album, I will certainly peek back into the past and see if anything is worth reworking for future endeavors. For now, enjoy my digital archive. I gladly share it with any who have the interest and the ears to listen.

Note: The tracks "World Hunters Main Theme" and "Forever Sleep the Stars" were created for a video game (called World Hunters) that never came to pass.

-Jon