I was cruising through one of the seemingly infinite folders of backed-up files from old computers I have dumped on a 1TB external hard drive, looking for footage I need for a documentary I’m starting preproduction on, and came across this gem tagged at the end of of a (poorly) transferred VHS tape:

I immediately started taking screen grabs while doing a live commentary on Twitter, and others found it equally hilarious, demanding to see the full video, so, well, here it is.

I’ve talked before about The Jason Only Project, the bedroom music project that was basically just me and Jason Feinberg vamping on guitar and vocals (and occasionally drum machine). The song to which I’m so very melodramatically lip-syncing in the above video is from one of our early jam sessions, something I titled, retrospectively, “Tainted Window.” I don’t know how many of the lyrics you can make out, but I improvised them all on the spot, and I think they included mentioning a bird I spotted outside the window of the bedroom in which we recorded that tape.

The video was recorded in the room I was living in, rent-free, thanks to a friend/former employer of my mother at the time. He ran an Italian furniture store, and my bedroom was basically the sitting room at the front of his little house, hence why it doesn’t look like a bedroom at all. At night, I would just pull a small mattress out from the hallway to use as a bed, then put it back away in the morning, so the room remained a nice showpiece.

This was during a period when I was kinda floating between retail jobs, was super broke, didn’t have a reliable car, and spent a lot of time teaching myself to record music, armed with only a really cheap little Yamaha keyboard and a tape recorder. But I had this video camera I kinda just permanently borrowed from my parents, and apparently a lot of time on my hands, so voila!

The sad thing is that I probably thought this was really cool and dark and serious at the time, as opposed to what it actually is: hilariously maudlin. And now on the interwebs for your enjoyment.