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Honestly, I’m not sure how to go about doing this. I was told to look at the websites of my peers and get a feel for how it’s done, but I’d rather get right to it in the name of laziness.

Hello. My name is Evan Saathoff. The correct pronunciation of my last name is sad-off, which I guess is the opposite of sad-on. I’m into the whole thing where you write songs, then play and record them.

I’ve written quite a few since I started almost ten years ago-somewhere in the neighborhood of 120. Many have been recorded, too. At least half, I’d say. I have a tendency to start projects then abort them before completion, so for the most part, those recordings are nothing more than nostalgic mile markers. But they’re recorded all the same.

I was once in a band called Matt’s Closet. We were an odd group of youngsters, unsure of what we were doing. To illustrate, we used to play ill-attended shows twice a month at a bookstore/coffee house in Pittsburg, KS. We made our set two hours long with a twenty-minute break between hours. Sometimes I’d bust a string twenty minutes in and call break right there and then. When I remember shit like that, it makes me shudder. We started when I was fourteen, broke up when I was sixteen. This was when I started writing songs for myself. And also, it was when I began working with Adam Jeffers.

At the time I was doing what I found out later was called “shadow recording”. I placed two tape recorders in front of me, and played my song into recorder A. Then I rewound the tape. When it was rewound, I hit play on deck A and record on deck B. While deck B was recording, I’d lean over and add something like a vocal or additional guitar part. When the song was over I’d rewind and repeat, this time with deck B playing and deck A recording.

Shadow recording sucked. I could only get about two or three overdubs in there before tape hiss made the whole thing unrecognizable. But at the time, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. For the first time in my life, I could write harmony vocals, and if I wanted to, guitar parts. I even tried keyboard a couple times. Because of this break-thru, I started writing songs differently before. So naturally, I broke up the band.

Adam and I were already pretty chummy by this time. He was one of the five people who liked my band, so when I told him what I was up to with that two tape recorder shit, he was interested.

The thing about Adam was, he had a computer. And on this magical machine, he had programs that could record me without any tape hiss at all no matter how many overdubs I did.

And so, over the course of my junior year of high school (his senior), we began work on my first real album, The Evan Saathoff Solo Effort #1. When I listen to it now, I’m torn between “aw, isn’t it cute,” and “Jesus Christ, this is embarrassing”. Either way, we were ecstatic at the time.

Anyway, a handful of years and a couple of legitimate musical releases have passed since then. I’m still up to the same old stuff, and one of the results is this website, which I’m supposed to write a bio for. But there’s not much else to say. I love Babe: Pig in the City and my favorite food is french fries.