After the last day of school my junior year of high school, I spent the afternoon with my friends in the classroom of one of my favorite teachers, who was leaving the next year to do graduate work at UNC-Chapel Hill. He did two things that afternoon: made all of us participate in a "Worst Poem Ever" competition, and gave me a vinyl single from the band Built to Spill that he had received from Doug Marsch himself at a concert in the late 90s as a gift for helping lug the band's gear into a venue for a gig.
He had been my sophomore English teacher and Journalism teacher for two years, and his taste in rock from the early 90s really got me started in exploring indie music from before my high school years. This vynil single and a record player happened to be in his classroom one day; I put it on while we were editing an edition of our school newspaper, and I've been hooked on the band ever since. It was a single for "Strange," which was the lead single from their album Ancient Melodies of the Future (a roundabout way of saying the album was a melody for today...), and contained an instrumental b-side that I've spent countless hours trying to find online to no avail.
Luckily, another one of my friends had the equipment to digitize a vinyl record, and thus was able to make me a digital copy of the b-side, titled Intrumental #2 on the insert for the single. It was the track that got me started on Built to Spill, and it was a great soundtrack for editing a newspaper. Enjoy.
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