Cory is actually quite proud of the production, performance and songwriting on this record; while not up to the level of his adult professional recordings, Rechording The Times was recorded by a 17-year-old musician on analog reel-to-reel gear set up in the janitor’s closet of the apartment complex of his dear friend Mark Van Horn. Mark . It features a group of incredibly talented teen musicians, all in high school and already performing live shows and making recordings in the San Francisco Bay Area. Several went on to professional careers in music.
Neither Cory nor Mark had any professional training in recording arts when this album was recorded — they were self-taught — but this recording by two kids rivals many 80s hits in production artistry. It also rivals 80s hits in some new-digital-era production excesses…
Rechording The Times is fairly stunningly philosophical about Cory’s tumultuous and traumatic high school years where his brother and father both died, demonstrates Cory was thinking about social justice and injustice even before he arrived at Stanford (check out As We Move On, a rather astounding avant garde track for a 17-year-old juxtaposing speeches by Martin Luther King and Hitler, which Cory and Mark performed live at their high school’s senior concert that year to an audience of people who still reference the performance to Cory to this day), and…
The album was part of Cory’s Stanford undergraduate application, and while he doesn’t quite remember the exact dates and none of his immediate original family nor Mark Van Horn are alive to confirm specifics, this means he completed it by December of 1987. The perspective Cory has on this album now as a longtime college (and former high school) recording arts teacher has given a whole new light to this album for him: If two 17-year-olds sent me an album with this much depth of subject matter, musicianship and technical accomplishment with literally zero training… Cory would let that kid into Stanford too.
It was never released professionally. It didn’t even have an album cover.
Below are two tracks from the album before the remaster. The existing tapes have been slightly sonically damaged, with the high end a little muted and bass a bit boomy. Before the album’s remastered release in 2028, Cory will undergo a renovation and remaster of the album to give it even better sonic quality than Cory and Mark originally gave it.
In 2028 Cory will release his unprecedented epic series (a book, three albums, singles, videos, and live events) Scenes From Fatherhood: Photo Albums & Skeleton Closets. It will consist of a book and three albums…
•Scenes From Fatherhood: Photo Albums & Skeleton Closets (Act 1)
•Scenes From Fatherhood: Photo Albums & Skeleton Closets (Act 2)
•Rechording The Times
The book is a heartfelt chronicling of Cory’s experience as both a son and a father. Act 1 & Act 2 of Scenes From Fatherhood: Photo Albums & Skeleton Closets are new collections of music. Together with the book of the same name, they give an unfiltered and raw artistic view of life from an artist who’s experienced both its beauty and its traumas.
Cory will also retro-release his original album, Rechording The Times, recorded at 17 and 18 years old, which was never professionally released but documents the experience and feelings of a teen in a tumultuous teenage time that saw half of his immediate family pass away in less than two years’ time.
Above is an uplifting sneak peek of Photo Albums & Skeleton Closets. It’s Act 1‘s closing track, Ode To Sidney Grace, a song 18 years in the making originally written and recorded for an audience of one and given to her the eve before Cory, his wife Janette and their younger daughter Riley dropped Sidney off at college. One of the many sunny spots in a life well lived, Ode To Sidney Grace will finally be released professionally as a remastered track for the first time with the album.