Ursulines, Chicago, 1992

Every now and again a piece of nostalgia comes out of nowhere and stops the world around me for a while. I mean, nostalgia is weird. I am an extremely sentimental person. It's probably not a very healthy sentimentality I guess. I'm idealistic, I tend to romanticize things, which is a recipe for ending up with a lot of regrets.

(I ramble a bit below. Feel free to skip straight to the video.)

The upside to that particular orientation to the world is that when you're in the middle of it, when everything is pure, unblemished potential, it's absolutely magical.

I believe this cycle of transcendent hope and disappointment are hallmarks of what someone might refer to, in a mildly uncharitable way, as the "artistic temperament". Yes, as the kids would say, it me.

Anyway, as I keep repeating, I've been in a lot of bands. The older I got, the less transcendently hopeful they started to seem, but the early ones are all very special to me because of how crazy and innocent they all were. My band in college was like this. We were called The Ursulines. I still to this day have no idea why we were called that. It's an order of nuns, but that wasn't the reference that led to the name. You'll have to ask the singer.

We had no idea what we were doing. We were just sensitive weirdos who came together to play music. Our personal styles were the sum total of our influences filtered through our own abilities. We had no agenda. We weren't trying to sound a particular way and then second guessing everything we did against that goal. It just sort of worked organically, and then filtered through the musical zeitgeist of 1992, we ended up sounding like a cross between The Railway Children, Swervedriver and The Stone Roses.

And it worked. People somehow liked it. We somehow managed to play a ton of shows. I have no idea how. I was in plenty of bands in Chicago after the 90s and it was literally impossible to get shows unless you were in Joe Shanahan's personal rolodex. And, I shit you not, The Ursulines even played The Metro.

I was twenty years old.

I hadn't thought too deeply about The Ursulines in a while, but today Derek, the singer, let me know that a very nice DJ named Ryan Hamilton had unearthed our second demo and covered it on his Undiscovered & Recovered Podcast. The full episode is below.

I definitely wasn't expecting this to pop up in my life thirty-three years later, but it's incredibly validating. It's not just about my silly band and our music. I love seeing people get this excited about music. I love seeing that music still means so much to someone. I'm honored to ever have been the catalyst for that kind of excitement, inspiration, or comfort in anyone's life. I'm so happy someone found this music after all these years and shared it.