Well it's been a ridiculously long time since writing the last history installment and there is still much to tell.

Senior year. By this time Jamey had moved and had been attending school in Michigan. Brad and myself were still in Johnson City, TN. Senior year was bright and uplifting for myself. There was an air of seniority, a last hurrah, leave a mark, start talking to people who you've ignored...sort of feel. Most of my senior year was occupied by school, theater, and trying to get into a college. Yadda yadda yadda.

Brad and myself continued to particpate in our high school's theater program. Jamey, to my knowledge, was trying to make the best of finishing out his senior year at a brand new school. Each of us continued to do musical things. Brad and myself wrote humorous skits to perform at theater competitions. Jamey kept in contact with the both of us via e-mail, venting frustrations, talking about work, and how friggin' cold it got during the winter months.

Sometime at the beginning of summer of 1999, Jamey mentioned that he was going to move again. This time to Texas, which is where he stays to this day. But he was going to pass through Tennessee and wanted to get together I think in June or July.

We'd all graduated, experienced that sense of elation of saying goodbye to a stifling institution, stifling teachers, stifling rules...and onto a different institution with a slight twist of freedom.

Anyway, I had decided early on if we were going to record music, I wanted to have a fuller band sound. We'd always just recorded with one guitar and a couple voices and maybe some keyboard. The whole effect was rather clumsy. During the year away from The Derelllicts, I was getting into Elvis Costello's music and learning how to hear things and structure things in music. So when it came to figuring out how I'd like the sessions to go, I decided I would play percussion from Brad's keyboard on as many songs as possible. And to be honest, no offense to Brad Smith, but he's never been too terribly proficient on the keyboard, so I wanted to take over playing that as well. This was all an attempt to make a fuller sound and to let Jamey and Brad have more range vocally.

We decided to do these sessions at my house, starting early in the morning, going out to lunch together, and going back to finish before the evening. The whole process was absolutely magical. We recorded in my family's game room. It had a lot of space so we could spread out. However we opted not to do so. We geared ourselves to face each other with a tape recorder in the middle in a triangle formation...which is how we always did it...this bit is inconsequential so I'll skip ahead. Also this is supposed to be a "brief" history so I'll abbreviate and talk about the albums in fuller detail in other stories.

The sessions were absolutely brilliant and this is an understatement at best. The music really gelled and the words got more indepth. There seemed be more substance behind the improvisations, even moreso with the music which did indeed sound fuller. Brad, Jamey, and myself were in good spirits because we'd been away from each other for so long and we truthfully didn't know when we'd get together again as The Derelllicts. So after all the recording, improvisations, and ridiculous amounts of creativity, we went our separate ways for the remainder of the summer. I felt that this was our swansong and the whole recording sessions had such a wonderful vibe to them, I thought we should call the album It's Over and Done. I took the title from a line in one of Elvis Costello's songs. It just seemed fitting. Little did we know that we'd be back together a few months later.

Written October 9, 2002