At Least I Can Say I Tried

First track on the ROLE MODEL cd.

Named after lyrics from the song "One" by Breakwater, a Canadian band that played in Aaron Friedman's basement in the mid-90s (and arguably had a significant impact on the Towson-Glen Arm music scene.)

Sometime in early 1999, Rjyan went to the palatial home of pianist Josh Abramson, who also attended Dulaney High School in Timonium and agreed to let Rjyan record some songs on the state-of-the-art digital recorder he owned. At this point, Rjyan had a Nord Lead and an Akai S2000 sampler which he sequenced via MIDI from a Dell desktop PC running a pirated copy of Cubase-- however, he had no way of recording the instruments' output except for using the 1/8" Mic jack on the Dell, which seemed sub-optimal ("Julia Walsh" and "Your Handwriting" are the only released tunes that were recorded this way). A handful of songs were recorded quickly that evening, including this one, "Rjyan Kidwell's Funeral", "An Axe for the Frozen Sea Within Her," the "Catch A Lucky Star" remix. Josh's family home was the site of many big keg parties in the late 90s but the only one Rjyan ever attended was one that he induced the Arbutus-based Baltimore Rowdy Collective to crash as part of a senior year Anthropology class project.