Writing Records was started in 2011 by Chad Golda as a vehicle to release his album Book of Songs. With the momentum of these first recordings, and coming back from a trip to poland/czech republic, the album ABROAD was released of instrumentals featuring sound samples while taken in various places. More songs were being produced and the album Guitar Collections Three came together. This was the first album printed to CDs for the label.

By this point talented songwriter Wolf van Elfmand was ready to record a debut full length album and we set together to document his songs. Magic to the Lonely was released in 2012. Luke Callen was also regularly performing with Wolf and Chad at this time, and throughout a handful of sessions we picked recordings for his self titled album. The recording of the album House Sounds by Chad Golda would be the last album produced in Fort Collins, Colorado in 2012 and was released in 2013.

The label moved to Bay City, Michigan where the next two albums would be produced. First, writing music an instrumental album recorded live from various long to short musical samples. Next is 8IGHT, an album released in 8 versions. All different themed recordings of the same 8 songs. We moved back to Fort Collins and the album The Death of Wolf van Elfmand was recorded Sept 1st live to tape and released Sept 19th. Family + Friends by Chad Golda is a double album of originals then covers released to close out the year. Painted Tapes is an album of original songs by Chad Golda released in 2014. Sampled Collections One + Two is a double album with first guitar sample songs then organ samples released in 2015. Also that year So We Wait by Eric Bjella was culled from honed in sessions with this magical songwriter.

At the end of 2015 the label moved to Royal Oak, Michigan, and in 2016 released Dynamic Digital Drums by Chad Golda, an album of instrumental songs inspired from a Korg DDD1 drum machine. The Smokestack Tape comes as a split release with live recordings from Alex Zablocki and Josh Seymour. INSIDE by Chad Golda is an album of original songs recorded to an 8 track cassette recorder. This album had a featured flexi disc produced for the single ‘song for chet’. The album of original songs Numbers by Chad Golda was released in December of 2016 and also inspired the creation of cassette tape edition releases for many past releases. drawing music by Chad Golda is an album of instrumental improv recordings recorded over 20+ sessions throughout 2017. The Mysterious Nine by Chad Golda is an album of original songs released in 2018. This was the first album pressed to 12” LP vinyl for the label. Always The Present by Future Pilots is an album of instrumental improv recordings from over that summer by Robert Johnson, James Dunstan, and Chad Golda. And the recording Nine Minutes with Daniel Gray and Chad Golda is the first single released.

In 2019 analog/digital by Dead Oceans was released by the duo drumming of Eric Smith and Chad Golda while also playing wave vinyl delay manipulations. Also this year, CASSETTE by Chad Golda was released as an album of an abridged demo tape. Closing out 2019 we released MULTITRACK TAPE ONE by Chad Golda, an album recorded direct to the 8 track cassette recorder.

We now find ourselves in the year 2020. The first release of the year is LIFE by Chad Golda. A seven song collection recorded Oct/Nov 2019, mixed Dec 2019 and Jan 2020. March 2020 the quarantine occurred across america and this lead to the listening of unreleased material. That month we put together a collection of cassette recorded demos from The Mysterious Nine writing process. Our friend Eric Litchenberg helped master the recordings and on the two year anniversary of the album June 9th, The Mysterious Nine Demos by Chad Golda was released. On August 15th, 6 months to the day of recording the improv sessions, the album saturdaze was released with an hour long animation cover loop. On October 10th, the album Home Inside Recordings 2020 will be released comprised of songs written in late march/early april by chad golda. These songs were demoed in late april, and again in may. Between June 14th & 25th the songs were tracked to the tascam 488 mkii. Twelve songs were recorded and were first mixed in july, then were remixed one more time in august. Those recordings were sent to Dave Menzo for mastering. The ten track album was titled Home Inside Recordings after the title track Home Inside, released as a single on October 1st, but the album title just didn’t feel right without the 2020 year tag at the end because this year has felt like something else, and this album couldn’t have been recorded in any other time.

November 2020 the writing records ‘studio a’ was disassembled from the royal oak house and moved to the ferndale house but a mile away. In the months after recording one of the last live sessions august 22nd 2020 at the old studio we slowly assembled an hour long sample of the instrumentals and on new years day released a streaming loop on youtube of the music. On January 10th, 2021 we released 2021 Hour 1 and created a vibration for new recordings in a new world. Inside the new studio setup at the lewiston house in ferndale, we began with a number of tape experiments. the first experiments were something else, but the next 1/4” tape recordings are the next project to be released. the shapeshifting tapes released february 16th, 2021 are instrumentals recorded and manipulated before becoming digital. Next…

january 16th 2021, i filled four cassettes with new melodies and improv jams and on the 18th i digitally dubbed the cassettes and cut up tracks with simple titles. i listened over to these recordings and transcribed some lyrics and chord progressions. in march i went ahead and started 8 track tape recording sessions thinking i would record the album in a series of other flash sessions. these are real fun recordings but after a digital dub i felt more like there were the demos and i heard more sonic treatment to the songs. in june i brought the computer down into the studio and set out to record the album. by the end of june ten songs were recorded and in july made some simple mixes to listen to. early august after some car rides and headphones listens, i did another remix. these songs captured the songs for lewiston i heard that first day writing the songs.

rewind to 2019 when i finally got all the setup done on the owana house basement studio, i rewired the keyboards and microphones and started to record some tracks testing the levels across the room. getting the levels from any one instrument and moving on to the next. putting the microphone over the marimba in different areas hearing the different tones. layering rhodes pianos. flipping tracks reverse in garageband and jamming over it again. when im making this muisc i know its for me. its something i have played when drawing/painting, its music i played while cleaning up the studio. it gets to a point where i realize what is it doing here. it was originally titled 'youth see' i believe i was thinking something around wanting to see with new eyes, i changed the title to 'see' when i decided to name the files but still made no cover art. its 2022 and i find myself doing what i do, cleaning the studio, and i see this construction paper and i start cutting these figures out meant to represent each song and i am making the cover. i retitled the songs, did one last mixing of the recordings and the album was ready. it would be called what you see as an invitation to see whatever you want to hear in the music. Going with the theme of releasing long lost albums, the next 2022 release is NEW ROOMS, an album recorded december 2018 to febrauary 2019. these are songs originally heard on the album CASSETTE released in 2019. the reason why CASSETTE was released back then and not these recordings is basically i kept having troubles at the mixing stage and i loved the simple sound from the demo tape. 2020 rolls around and while writing to friend of the label eric lichtenberg he brings up wanting to collaborate. i think of these tracks and bounce stems for him to have fun with. time rolls by and out of the blue i get the first message back from eric with some mixes and its incredible. i wrote him back a few notes and he really went to town and made these tracks shine. i am so grateful to be able to share these recordings as i really feel the spirit of the songs in the demo recordings are a fun compare/contrast.

the project which came to be known as ONE took two years of songwriting to complete. throughout 2021 i filled a yellow notebook with writing. halfway through i knew i was filling this notebook with song ideas and wrote this on the inside cover ‘an imaginary greatest hits album cut from the best songs from never released albums’ and by dec 17th 2021 i sat down with the notebook, started strumming a guitar and wrote a song. that song was called ‘jackson’ and the idea was then in place to sit with the notebook once a month and write a song out of its pages. feb 2022 with the notebook opened to a set of pages that spoke to me in the moment, and wrote the song ‘you are 1’. by july the train was really rolling and i wrote eight songs. in august 2022 i felt like the batch of songs were a whole collection and set out to record them over a weekend. 21 songs were collected, and maybe 15 recorded that weekend, 12 were ready to be mixed and brought to dave menzo at dream house studios for some final mixing sessions in feb 2023. one last song was cut from the final sequencing in the album, and the 11 track album ONE was released june 9th, 2023.

in 2024 on february 2 through 6, at night i sat with a notebook flipping open to a page and began to construct a song around what i was reading. i recorded some demos that i would listen to loosely over the next couple months while playing along and figuring them out. near the end of july, the 21st through 31st i worked on transcribing the first recording, rewriting lyrics, and recording cassette demos. i had a weekend in early august 3 +4 to record a number of takes live to tape. one more session the next thursday the 8th and we had two takes of every song and different takes with piano or organ. one little half a song called 'an idea' just wanted to have an echoing voice so i plugged in the amp into the delay pedal and did one take. did a tape transfer on august 10 and 11. and then mixed throughout august. in september with the help of an old laptop i was able to burn these mixes to a cd and have a listen in the car while driving across michigan. noticing the organ parts had a huge eq difference i went back and edited some of those songs, and thats what we got! the first title i gave this collection was 2024 songwriting, and then when i made the july demos i titled it 2024 songwriting cassette. so it seemed natural to title this 2024 songwriting reel. next…