"Hey Brady, what's up with all that solo music?"

So I figured I might as well answer a quick question for those wondering about why the heck I've been doing so much solo music! Not to fear, Vanity Contest is still active and hard at work with new material. I figured for a while I might as well explain why there's an "about me" tab when I only have two major releases... right?

If you scroll a bit further, there's a TON of material that's from my earliest days of doing music. Those records from 2018 and back are all my earliest recordings and links to where you can find them. I was embarrassed by them for the longest time and took me a really long time to feel comfortable about them. For every half-decent idea, there were about 30 terrible ones. I was just learning how to use DAWs and just using my phone and whatever Garageband synth plugins I could find that I liked. Yeah, they're flawed, but it's my roots! The earliest gasps of Vanity Contest, for cryin' out loud! It took me a long time to accept that "hey, not everything I make is gonna be gold." Consider this the first public look into my vault. It's all the stuff I have available as of right now, plus things I've contributed to for other people's projects. I'm sure a few friends of mine even have original copies of CDs I burned for them lying around somewhere.

Someday I'd like to eventually compile the best of those earliest tracks (to be frank, there are quite a few rough sounding releases in there), and put them on my Bandcamp page as a compilation of the "best of" that era for me. I'll get around to that eventually, it's a neat little bit of history and great for me to keep track of what I've accomplished.

Recently, I've been writing about my entire experiences working with Vanity Contest and how those experiences have had an impact on me. I've always wanted to really get all the details I can remember down just for my own sake. It kinda hit me when my friend/former bandmate May told me how much content I have that I should honestly try to keep track of it all. THAT and my therapist said it's good for me! YouTube videos, music, artwork, photography... shit. There's a lot to dig through for not a lot of time spent doing this whole "art" thing. I'll put those essays out when I feel like they're good enough and worth reading. It'll happen, sooner or later.

I'm not sure how much sense any of that made but I figured I should provide at least a LITTLE insight. later!

- brady