rjhugginstuff / Selected work
Music
Audio-Only Recordings
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Bayou and Me
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Far From Home
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Ordinary Way
Videos
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Just One Drink
I don't do anything special to my hair. It's kinda like wolf hair – it's stiff and does what it wants. I don't have much say in the matter. I was just beginning to mature as a songwriter when I wrote this song about dwelling on short-term love affairs. It was sometime after 1994 (during the taping of The Kathleen Recs, just before getting involved in a band project with Adrian Darter and James Collins), but definitely sometime before I roomed with Jen and Jenny (which I think was 1998). Thanks again, girls, for the awesome guitar case – it's still my one and only.
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Back to Your House
c 1992. Sometimes it's hard to remember why love failed; sometimes we never actually know why.
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Brush
c 1993. Brush used to be called Arkansas Brush, but the song's about, like, when you just get a little taste of something, so I shortened it. It was inspired by possibilities rather than actual events.
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Amy
c 1998. Inspired by three Amys. I believed in romance, and spiritual purity in the face of seemingly hopeless circumstances, and the power of love to inspire personal self-redemption.... Amys have always taught me to be real.
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There is Only One
c 1994. I wrote this after processing a serious foray into organized Christianity and coming out of it with a bad taste in my mouth for organization, but with my spirituality intact – on some subtle level.
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Can't Buy Me Love
c 2008. There was a time when I referred to my guitar-based music as “front porch acoustic folk rock”. This song came near the end of that era when stomping my foot on a hardwood floor with plenty of crawlspace was still part of my heartbeat.
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Sampler: The Kathleen Recs
...are cassette tape recordings made in 1995 on a Fostex 4-track/mixer I'd picked up from North-West Arkansas musician Derek Van Lynn for $100. These are some of my best recordings, even though they're hissy analogs. I was in the process of re-mastering them all digitally when my PC's motherboard toasted out; the project sits dormant on an old hard drive until I can get the technology to harvest the files and get them back into play. The Sampler, here, was a live mix-down: I made notes on paper and tweaked the levels and balance as the recordings played into a compact disc recorder. This file was lifted from the cd.
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Room Without a View
This song externalizes my feelings about the unexpected death of a friend, and the friends who encircled her. I hadn't realized that YouTube was new when I made this one. Reluctant to expose my identity, I was posting under the pseudonym “R.J. Thisper” (“Thisper” was short for “This person”). I had no idea that I was one of the pioneers of multi-tracking peer-to-peer video and long-distance collaboration. Select the “Pioneer” link under this video to see the 2007 project I did when a bass player going by the handle “The Darkener” contacted me about sitting in on this song. In that year, YouTube automatically converted all videos to 240p (320x240 pixels in 4:3 ratio, like old tv screens), but soon after this video the platform introduced “high definition” 720p (1280x720 pixels in 16:9) to match the aspect ratio of the movies of that era. I wrote out the sheet music for the violin part, for which you may find a link a bit later.
rjhugginstuff
Across media.
Art, music, moving images, and words.
Available for commissions and creative opportunities.
ryanjhuggins@protonmail.com