Jonathan Rundman

28 Days in the Yellow Room

reissued as

11 Years and
28 Days in the Yellow Room

Those events occurred exactly eleven years ago, and now I find myself many albums, many addresses, and many experiences beyond the Yellow Room. It’s the Fall of 2003, and I suspect that my pending Fatherhood (the baby is due in January 2004) is causing me to reflect on my past and preserve the music of my youth and young adulthood. 28 Days in the Yellow Room was never released on CD, and the cassette tapes sold out years ago, so these songs and this period of my career have been unavailable to many people. I’m surprised how often I’m asked if that album can be purchased on CD. I have always answered that question with a “no” – until now!

In order to document the most obscure output of my musical life, I’m thrilled to reissue 28 Days in the Yellow Room on CD for the first time, complete with bonus tracks. These additional songs include modern re-recordings of the big “hits” from the 28 Days album, original demo recordings that preceded the album, and other songs (some written when I was 16 years old!) that didn’t make the cut for inclusion on the original cassette. It was amazingly enjoyable going through all sorts of old cassette tapes and re-discovering these recordings, and I’m very pleased with how well these early songs hold up.

Here’s the main lesson I learned during this process: if you make multi-track recordings, NEVER erase or dispose of the tracking tapes! I was such a fool in the early ‘90s…I took all the original tracking tapes from the 28 Days album and dubbed CDs onto them for listening on my car’s tape deck! (I think many of the song tracks from 28 Days were lost when I overdubbed The Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall on top of them.) Therefore, none of the songs from the original album could be re-mixed or improved upon. What you hear on this CD are the exact mixes that were on the original cassette release. Thankfully I kept some tracking tapes for other songs, so you get to hear the remixed, re-EQed, and cleaned up versions of demos like “Another Bad Day” and “When You’re Away.” But I really wish I had the tracks for ALL the songs! Lesson learned.

I’ve decided to manufacture a small limited-edition run of this reissue because I don’t expect a huge audience interested in the songs I was writing as a teenager. If you’re reading this now, and you enjoy any of the songs herein, I thank you for your attention.

Remembering the past, looking forward to the future,

Jonathan Rundman, Thanksgiving Eve 2003.