welcome to my thing!
This compilation is dedicated with great appreciation to Scott Lurowist. It’s unlikely any of this music would exist without his support, his generosity, and his patience, and I am forever in his debt. You’re gonna hear more about him soon enough, so let’s go…
Welcome, friends, to Minor Embarrassments, a compilation of songs I recorded over the course of almost twenty years. I recorded much more than this over a much longer period, but this is the “good stuff.” (How do you type air quotes?) As the title suggests, of all the embarrassing music I've recorded, these fourteen tracks are only minor embarrassments. This is the stuff I will allow other humans to listen to. Just wait until I leave the room, okay?
As a younger man, I had grand aspirations of hopping in my Volkswagen Super Beetle, driving out to California, and hitting it big as a songwriter, maybe even a rock star! I consider myself incredibly lucky in that I failed to do any of that. Seriously, think about it; would you want to be pushing 60 in the music industry in 2026? Bullet dodged, I say. But it’s not a total loss. At least I have a handful of recordings I can look at and say “I did that.” And then I can set 90% of them on fire, leaving us with the spiffy collection we have before us.
I’m going to tell you as much as I can about these songs. There will be gaps in memory, and there will be errors. Apocrypha shall abound. I don’t remember as much of my life as I ought to, and given what I do remember, forgetting the remainder is probably for the best. I do recall snippets of my past now and again and immediately think, "oh no no no no no let’s please don’t think about that ever again." Some call it trauma blocking, but I've always preferred "creative forgetting." Regardless, I’ll do my best to be honest, and to fabricate as little as possible. If you were there and you remember something more clearly than I do, please tell me. I'm not above retconning my own life story.
Over the course of 25-ish years, I recorded around 70 original songs, which really doesn’t sound like a lot for 25 years but I took a few breaks. The specific year I recorded my first album, Musaic, is lost to me. I don’t even remember recording it, or where I was living at the time, or what inspired it, nothing. You’d think I’d remember that about my very first foray into writing and recording original music, but alas no. That album could be a glitch in the Matrix for all I know. My second album, The Wish List, was definitely recorded during my year at UConn, so that must be…when the hell was I at UConn? The year after Tate George’s shot vs Duke, so I guess 1991. Can we call Musaic 1989? When did I leave the Air Force? I was still active duty when I saw Zappa in 1988, right? Geez, my brain is a mess. I’m saying I recorded Musaic in 1990, The Wish List in 1991, final answer.
None of this is relevant, nor are the release dates of Disguising Godiva, yeah, whatever, or Digital Dvorak because none of that material is on this compilation. Those were formative years for me as a songwriter. I was learning my craft by pastiche… hey, that Doors song is cool, I’ll write one just like it and then I will possess their skills. It doesn’t quite work that way, but it works that way more than you’d think. Wanna hear my Phish song? Wanna hear my Teenage Fanclub song? How about my Tears For Fears song? Well you can’t. The idea of anyone hearing that early material is mortifying to me. You think I sing terribly on these tracks? Go back and listen to some of that stuff. Except you can’t, because I will never allow it. Most of that stuff sounds like it was recorded inside a sleeping bag submerged in a tar pit, using two tin cans, a length of string, and a Fisher-Price “My First Shitty Tape Recorder.” (Note to self: Come back later and work on that joke. You can do better.)
By the time I fled my epically-fraught eight-month Boston residency under cover of darkness and landed on Block Island - whatever year that was - I was starting to find some kind of identity as a songwriter. I had stopped writing Jim Morrison songs and started writing Ron Moses songs. (Actually, they were Ron Spiegelhalter songs, as this was before I got married and took my wife’s name because wouldn’t you?) My two summers on the island were easily the most important in getting me out of Xeroxland. The songs were flowing, I had a significant audience, I had meaningful feedback, I even had collaborators who were perfectly happy doing whatever I asked them to. Most importantly, I was gaining genuine respect and recognition as a songwriter, both from others and myself. When you can whip out a guitar at a bonfire and play original songs that no one knows and they actually dig them? That’s magical.
One day a kid I didn’t even know asked me to sit down with him and show him how I put my songs together. It was a real “sitting at the feet of the master” moment, as narcissistic as that sounds. Regardless, you can’t ask for stronger validation than that, and I soaked it up like a ShamWow. I had found my role within my peer culture; I was the music guy. Everyone’s got their thing, you know? This was mine.
Fast forward to 1998, probably? I cyber-knew Scott Lurowist via an online forum we frequented. Scott became aware of my songwriting proclivities, and he made me aware of the fact that he possessed a very nice multi-track DAT setup but had nothing to record with it. So I packed up my guitar and drove over three hours to upstate New York and we got to work. A few months and a few invited friends later, we had Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, which I credited to the faux-band Disguising Godiva. (Cover art to your right, courtesy of Felice Vincelette.) This was a watershed moment in my musical career if there ever was one. The material was solid, and it all sounded quite good, thanks primarily to Scott.
The performances were... well, the invited friends’ performances were great! My performances… mixed bag, I’d say. Better than anything I’d recorded up to that point, but still mostly lazy. Scott once asked me why I pushed the other musicians for perfection while I was perfectly content with a crappy take of my own. I may not have said it at the time, but the honest answer would have been because I was the boss, and the boss gets to be lazy if he wants to. I can tell those guys we need another take. Who’s gonna tell me to take it again, Scott, you? Oh yeah right, he did tell me that. I believe my response was something like, “meh.” I should have listened to Scott, people. (Or even better, I should have made him the boss.) But in all honesty, none of my work on HAHG is wretched, and some of it is really quite nice. I prefer to hide my flaws behind the word “demo” as if that word magically forgives all, which it does because I'm the boss and I say it does.
The follow-up album, Vulva, would have been a more elaborate, band-oriented effort were it not for the fact that I wrote and made everyone record a song called “Think” which was so painfully awful on so many levels, it caused the entire project to collapse under the weight of its own suck. Worst case of sophomore slump ever. (At least the cover art by the late Zoogz Rift was pretty cool.) I don’t believe Scott and I recorded together after that, which is a shame, because we made a good team. But we got one surprisingly decent album out of it, plus a few stray tracks of varying worth, so what’s to regret?
There’s more to discuss on that subject and others, but we’ll cover it in the track-by-track rundown via the menu to your left. Yes, there’s more reading. Don’t be a baby.
Before I send you on your way, let me just say that I hope you find at least some of these songs enjoyable. And who knows, maybe some stranger out there will discover this stuff and think, “Hey, this is pretty good! Why didn’t he do more?” The answer is, I did do more, and it was garbage. Full disclosure, I did compile another set of older tracks under the title Major Cringe, but that’s a story for never. Until then, I hope you enjoy my humble collection of toe-tappers.
-ron moses, january 2026
All tracks remastered using the eMastered online mastering service. eMastered is AI-driven.
Cover photo licensed from Shutterstock.
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