The Story of BasementDwellers Collection
This one will be a bit different than the rest of my other DAVE story things. I have already written at length about all of the songs that were featured on the album, so I will detail the process behind creating it instead.
I had the idea to make physical versions of my music for a while. There is a Google Doc somewhere on my Drive where I theorized what I would put on a cassette if I ever indeed did make one. Here is that doc:
DAVE RUNTIME (NO BONUS TRACK): 13:58
GREAT BIG WORLD RUNTIME: 11:19
DOIN THANGS RUNTIME: 9:22
BOTH LIL LUNGS ALBUMS RUNTIME: 20:41
Big brain ideas: I put some live Lil Lungs songs on the Lil Lungs side and I put either demos or new stuff on the Dave side
LIL LUNGS ALBUMS+LIVE IN WATERTOWN RUNTIME: 23:11
(I cannot believe I was seriously considering putting Lil Lungs on a cassette tape)
Not too long after this I bought a boombox which had recording capabilities. I, being the genius that I am, decided to put my phone up to the microphone and play all of my music at full volume, in order to record my music on cassette. It sounded like absolute garbage, and I quickly threw out that idea in favor of a better one: to put my music on CD. The reasoning for this was that producing vinyl is extremely expensive, and I couldn’t properly make cassette tapes yet. But a bunch of people have CD players in their cars, and since a lot of my peers are starting to drive, they could be bumpin’ to DAVE on their commute to school.
I can’t remember the exact day that I ordered the CDs and their cases off of Amazon, but I do remember that they showed up a day after DAVE 3 was released. What a day that was. I had all of the files ready to go on my computer, and all that was left to do was burning the files onto the discs. All twenty-five of them. From what I recall, it took over an hour. I didn’t have any labels, so I wrote the title on the CD with a permanent marker.
At that point, they looked like this:
Either the day before or the day of, I had asked if I could use anybody's color printer, and Emma said yes, so I walked over to her house with a full box of CDs in my arms.
Over the course of several hours, a person and I (mostly the person), with the help of the person’s parents, printed and cut out all 50 of the album covers (front and back). As thanks for helping with the entire process and also purchasing my albums the day prior, I gave the person’s dad an album for free. I also gave a free one to the person. The actual purchase of the album was made by the person’s sister, Alaina. After that, I went home with a sense of accomplishment and 25 CDs in a box in my arms.
Pictures taken during/after the process
Later on that night, I remembered that Bandcamp download codes were a thing, so I spent twenty goddamn minutes trying to get our printer and computer to work so I could print out the codes. I had a hundred of them, so I put a download code with each CD, and put the leftovers in the CD box. I still have those sitting in my room.
I sold nearly all of the CDs I produced, which was very surprising to me. I thought like a few people would buy them, and I had the idea to go into record stores and sneak them onto shelves. I didn’t have to do that luckily, as that may or may not be illegal. I kept a running list of everyone who bought one, and there were a couple people I couldn’t account for, but it was a lot of my friends and family. Some people in my band class even bought them, along with people who didn’t even have CD players.
I’m not really sure how to close this, other than possibly some plans for the future. I preemptively purchased a CD spindle so I can make some more, but that will be a bit later. I might also make some cassettes because I can actually make them now.
FUN FACTS:
The cover of the CD is the actual setup I used to record [UNTITLED]
The inside cover is a picture taken while on a Discord call which was a theorized cover for DAVE 3, but I never ended up using it for that. The personnel listed are taken from each album, but since Music for White People to Clap To has nobody listed on the back cover, I put a question mark
All of the designs were finalized the day of printing, with the back cover, seeing as it is a bit larger than the front, being finalized when we started printing
The back cover has a picture of me looking quite angry. This was while I was painting a drawing of Kilroy, and I was wearing a Phish shirt.
This is the last time that the old BasementDwellers logo was used, because as soon as Sam got one, he pointed to it and said, “Oh, you’ve put a swastika on the back.”
It was a pain to get the title “Music for White People to Clap To” to fit on the back and inside covers
DAVE was remastered fully for this release, as I realized a lot of the songs did not play well on external speakers