Hard Knox

Home recordings performed, recorded, and produced by James Jackson Toth.

'To quickly address the elephant in the room - certainly, collections of demos, outtakes and home recordings are mostly bogus, but obviously you're reading this, so obviously I've somehow been coerced into releasing this batch of tunes, and you've bought it or stolen it or borrowed it or gotten a promo or whatever, so let's cut to the chase. In my defense, all of the cuts contained herein are 'songs' in the traditional western sense - my experiments in 'surf harmonica' and 'doom zydeco' will not be chronicled here, deep and plentiful as those archives may be. All of the songs on this collection have been, at one time or another, considered for inclusion on a Wooden Wand album. As such, they make up about 5% of a towering archive, but I sleep better knowing that I have at least spared you that other 95%. The lyrics here bug me in many cases - in some instances the words were used as syllabic placeholders, which is the price you pay for the immediacy and, some would argue, vitality of recording demos of songs the same day you write them. Nowadays, I don't record as many demos as I used to. But I have a bad memory, so I still occasionally break out the mics and cables and allow the creepy muse - a pest, really - do what it does, and transmit something to me. I've missed many episodes of Mythbusters this way. You've already pardoned the narcissism, now pardon the cliche: I stand behind these songs as 'snapshots' and enjoy them despite their many flaws. I hope you do, too. Everything here was recorded by me on either a Roland BR-8 digital eight track or it's flashier, more Cosmopolitan cousin, the BR-1600, with incalculable assistance from Jexie Lynn, who accompanies me on many of these songs and who's encouragement and creativity allowed many of them to be. Most of the recordings were done at my then-home in beautiful Knoxville, TN between October 2002 and January of 2007, just prior to the retirement o