The summer of 1990 was easily the worst couple of months in my life. I was living in Richmond Virginia in an apartment I could barely afford, having lost my primo gig airbrushing T-shirts at King's Dominion an amusement park 20 miles north of town. The economy in Richmond was at an ebb and after a month of trudging around filling out job applications I was beginning to feel pretty near unemployable. My relationship with the woman I had dated all through college had ended badly and without an adequate sense of closure. The band I'd been in had disintegrated (c.f. Teenbeat 196: The Soul Of Scaley Andrew for details) and I was left with a lot of time to sit in my room and be amorose, navel-gazing 20-year old. I traded my wah-wah pedal for Mark Nelson's terrible Squire Stratocaster and began writing songs. I wrote most of the songs on BRUISER in a four-week period, drewing on my overall unsatisfactory experiences: attending poetry readings ("Cushion"), being broke ("John's Bah Mitzvah"), and frustrated in love as in all other things ("Ocelot", "Opener", et al). I also wrote a couple of songs about my cat Bob who died later, in Winter, as a sort of capper to the whole damn year.
I had met John Rickman at an Ambulance Family show earlier that year and we began playing together, practising every afternoon in August and September until we played our first live show. We added Marianne McGee as our french horn player and Dave Park as our bass player in the interim, and the four of us became something of a pretty tight little live unit for a while. We recorded a single ("Skyscraper"/"Ocelot"; TEENBEAT 66), then Marianne got married and quit the band, and John and I moved to Washington DC. Having booked studio time a few months before, Dave and JHohn and I drove up to New York and recorded BRUISER even though the band as we knew it was pretty much over. The songs are in the order we always played them live, and the budget for the whole recording was $600.
Andrew Beaujon, 7/15/94 Arlington Virginia, USA