I'm currently in the process of recording/mixing a collaboration with myself entitled "D.Grant Meets the Reaper". So that you may understand what this means, I offer this brief synopsis of the birth of Reaper:

Up until age eleven, I was a relatively normal kid who answered to his birth name.
When resident vampire Jim Grove left "Walk Among Us" sitting in front of our family's stereo, all of that changed. Reaper was born.

Jim was friends with my older brother, and he looked like he stepped out of the pages of an Ann Rice novel...a striking figure for an impressionable kid to look up to. At that time, the music i listened to was all hard rock and thrash metal so, i wasn't immediately open to the music of the Misfits. However, I recognized their iconic "famous monsters" logo, and Crimson Ghost as it graced the shirts of nearly every metal band I listened to. I gawked at the creatures on the album cover a few times, but never bothered to listen to it... when I finally placed needle in groove, the impact was immediate and explosive.

I had been struggling to write songs for a few years, trying to hone my adolescent speed metal skills... but this stuff was much easier, and much cooler to play. Before I knew it, I had amassed a dozen or so songs... short and fast. I would spend afternoons glued to Channel 20's "Thriller Double Feature" or with my nose planted in an issue of EC Comic's "Tales from the Crypt"... all fodder for these new creations. I would raid the local record stores grabbing any Misfits vinyl I could. I was obsessed, and my adoration grew larger as my devilock grew longer.

My father played in various bar bands, and occasionally some recording equipment would land in the house. One day, I ran home from school to find a Tascam 4 track lying around, and I went to work learning how to use it. I had been recording songs in my basement with a boom box, the process went something like this:

Put the boom box on the far side of the room...
"1-2-3-4" record drums...
Run upstairs, put the tape in the stereo...
Play it through the speakers in the basement...
Run back downstairs....
Grab a guitar....
Wait for the "1-2-3-4" to blast through the speakers...
Play along with the drums, recording everything on the boom box...
Run back upstairs...
and so on...

It was a timely (and tiring) process, and the results were less than stunning. With the Tascam I had all the features in one box.

I wasted no time in recording a cover of "Skulls", this allowed me to test the waters and figure out how to "bounce" tracks to turn four tracks into six, and sometimes eight tracks. Before too long I had enough songs for a demo. I threw them all on one tape, and called it "Songs for the Macabre". I made a few copies of the tape and passed them out at school.

To be continued...