Timothy Lalonde
Growing up in southern Virginia before internet and cell phones, the only music I knew was Baptist hymns and the radio. So my mind was blown in 1998, when I got a computer and discovered how to download illegal mp3s (in the good old days, that meant 1 hour per song on a dial up connection)
There was a message board where some dude would post 10 Beatles songs each week, and I would spend a full day tying up the phone line to download those tracks. John Lennon's Holy Ghost quickly came upon me, and I was reborn with a mission to write glorious pop songs to channel my high school fantasies and dreams of escape to a better place without cheerleaders and football.
I immediately invested every penny of my grocery store paycheck to turn my tiny bedroom into a hit making studio. The first song I ever recorded was "Soda Girls," a track heavily influenced by the late 90s psychedelic Elephant 6 bands like early/wacky Of Montreal. "Soda Girls" showcases an incredible lineup of 15 year-old musicians from the era: Tim Lalonde on spoon + shoebox for drums, Tim Lalonde on cheap Ibanez guitar, Tim Lalonde on cheap Ibanez guitar E-string for bass, and Tim Lalonde moonlighting as Paul&George with "oooohs" and "ahhhhhs" galore. You can almost taste the innocence being lost in this pubescent opine for the girls that never say hello. The organic arrangement takes us back to a time before endless wars, smartphone addictions, and autotune.
