Rick Quimby -- The Early Years
This CD features songs I wrote and recorded during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s in Worcester, MA. At that time I had settled into my faculty position at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and was finding more time for my musical passions than I had during my graduate student and post-doc years of 1975-1982. I was attending a Worcester coffeehouse, John Henry’s Hammer, which featured nationally known folk music acts, and was starting to help out with the sound system there. Along the way I got to know some people with a love of music and nature, and this inspired several songs on this CD (tracks 2, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16). In addition to music I was doing a lot of bicycling through the Massachusetts countryside, and on one of those rides I came up with the music and lyrics for track 1, Blaze of Glory, inspired by the spectacular New England fall foliage. Connections to family inspired several other songs (tracks 3, 5, 6, 7).The songs were originally recorded on a 4-track Tascom Portastudio tape deck, and in 2016 the 4 tracks for each song were converted to a digital format in a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), and processed for the recording on this CD. No additional instrumentation or vocals were added for this re-mastered version, only volume balance and frequency equilization adjustments.