One of my favorite bands is this Canadian group, Sloan. They’ve been around for 30-plus years now, and they have a lot of records.

One of the members of the band, Chris Murphy, often remarks that many of his favorite bands are ones that had big catalogs of music. “More than individual songs or records, I am a fan of careers, particularly the careers of bands,” he’s said.

I can relate. While some of my favorite groups had short, sweet runs that managed to produce a small body of excellent work, I really enjoy the idea of looking back at years—or decades—of an artist’s output and knowing that they created a canon of work.

For me in my world, that is the purpose of having a site like stevecafmusic.com, which is nothing more than a place to cull together recordings. So if one wanted to hear some stuff I’ve either created or been a contributing part of, this is a place to find it.

Of course, I wish there were a lot more on there at this point. After all, I’ve been doing this to one degree or another for over 30 years, and the amount of stuff I have on that page is a relatively small sample of works, considering all that could be on it.

Why? It comes down to the unfortunate situation I refer to as “the injustices of resources and time.” Those two things seem to rarely align. For example…

When I was a young person—let’s say 21 and under—I seemingly had all the time in the world. But I didn’t have money to make too many professional-grade recordings.

Before I had a house and eventually children, I still had freedom and some degree of steady incoming earnings, but I had to dedicate much of those resources to building my non-musical life. (Non-regrettably, to be sure, so I’m not complaining… it’s just a statement of fact.)

Then, when I found myself in a position where I could afford to invest in studio time, time itself became a premium.

If rough productions and bootleg or budget-level recordings were included, the number of things on that site would be much, much larger. The fact that many songs are not there is not (in many instances, anyway) because I think they’re of less worth than the ones that are there; they’re merely flawed productions. The songs are good, even when the packaging is not, so to speak.

But even though much of what is up there was culled from stuff from the last ten years, it doesn’t mean that’s when it all started. The canon is indeed bigger.

It’s been a goal, though, in my middle-age-creeping-towards-later-adulthood, to try to feed this desire by gathering more and more proper, respectable music releases. So I hope to have stevecafmusic.com continue to grow until one day it can, hopefully, be a huge collection. Maybe no one will go there, but if they do, they’ll know I was here. The thought alone that the option is there brings me a certain amount of comfort and satisfaction.

In the future, the plan is to keep on recording. (I just booked some time to do some informal acoustic recordings in the remaining months of 2024, and I hope to record another full record in 2025.) I also hope to find older recordings and demos that maybe weren’t up to snuff from a fidelity standpoint and find a way to clean them up so they can be included. We shall see.