The Deleted Years

Gone but not forgotten

I’ve been having writer’s block for almost two months. Zero ideas, zero motivation. It’s very disconcerting for me because I feel like I was born with ideas in my head… it’s been a constant stream - even a torrent - my whole life but lately, it’s been a trickle at most. I’ve been going through all of my old unfinished material as far back as 2014, hoping something would jump out at me but so far nothing has managed to pull me toward actually getting down to business. So, in an act of desperation I’ve decided to try something completely different.

Rather than trying to force myself to create, I will instead, curate.

For years, I’ve been hauling around a collection of artifacts: CDs, cassettes, minidiscs, records, posters, concert ticket stubs and VHS tapes of bands that I’ve seen, performed with or toured behind. Most of them are recordings of bands I’ve played with or shows that I saw since I first got involved in the music scene around 1998. Ive carted them from place-to-place for so long now, it’s ridiculous. Apartment to apartment, city to city… boxes that always seemed too important to leave behind, but too much effort to ever really deal with.

A couple of years ago I started picking away at the idea of creating a website to host it all: A catalogue of my local scene and all of the cool bands and artists that I’ve enjoyed along the way. This week, I’m back at it, trying to make it real.

I’m calling it The Deleted Years… at least until a better name comes along.

I call the years between about 2000–2010 the “deleted years” because so much of that era seems to have disappeared online. This was the time when many of us were downloading music off of Napster/Kazaa/Limewire/GrooveShark/etc all willy-nilly… like we were afraid that if we didn’t grab as much as we could, we’d never be able to listen to that music ever again. Shortly thereafter, the now-contemporary version of social media and streaming music started becoming a thing, and the iPod and other mobile music players started dying off, eventually replaced by the all-in-one convenience of the smartphones that we all use today.

Since then, bands have broken up, blogs and websites have disappeared, Myspace lost everyone’s uploads, and entire chapters of local music history just blinked out of existence. Sure, some of the recordings can still be found if you look hard enough but mostly, if they still exist at all, they’re scattered around in dusty boxes in parent’s basements, frozen on old forgotten hard disk drives and dead iPods, or stuck on poorly-labeled CD-Rs which nobody can play anymore.

If you’re anything like the average person in 2025, you’ve most likely lost track of or entirely forgotten about many of the bands that you enjoyed in that era. Maybe you saw them live, maybe you downloaded an online-only single release as an mp3 from a message board and then it just lived in your old iTunes library - but now that single and possibly the whole band is just lost to time.

That’s what this Deleted Years project is all about:

A screenshot of the site in progress

The site is modeleld after the old MySpace look and feel, since that was the defacto hub of the internet in that era (Facebook didn’t really start taking off until around 2009 or so) and aside from ReverbNation, it’s where so many of us “lived” at the time.

I want this site to feel like stepping back into that moment: low-res photos, messy HTML layouts, and song players that load one track at a time. If I’m being honest with myself, this whole thing is probably just as much about nostalgia as it is about preservation. Also, I haven’t built a website since that era, so my site designing skills are basically just what one needed to customize HTML tags and pages haha.

I’m told that in order to have a “compelling substack post” I need to wrap this up with a mission statement… So, I guess if there’s any kind of real mission to this at all, it’s to preserve and share the sounds and memories of a time and a scene that shaped so many of us but has since been essentially forgotten and left to wilt in the cracks of our shared digital history. In other words, the “deleted years” don’t have to stay deleted.

I hope that what is essentially just my own personal vault might eventually grow into a community archive… a place where others can contribute their own lost recordings and forgotten shows. At this point, I’m just building the skeleton of the site and digitizing and cleaning up the old audio that I have, tagging it, and writing down the stories behind the band and recording. Trying to remember where the band was from, who was in it, where the show was, and if I can conjure it, any dusty old memories that I might have kicking around in the cobwebby corners of my brain.

Maybe this will shake me out of my creative block… Maybe it’ll help me remember where I came from. Either way, it needed to get done at some point and this feels like the right time to get started.