The story of a boy and his t-shirt.
This is the song that started it all. Andrew and Ben had recently been reunited as roommates, both landing in the Boston area for work. One evening Andrew called Ben over to show off a metal song he’d been writing. It was all MIDI played through Ableton Live, but the composition was legit. All it needed was some lyrics…
We started spitballing ideas and came up with a character: a boy in high school with a dirty Megadeath t-shirt, compaining about school and life and such. It was Andrew who first said the phrase “these stains are who I am” out loud. From there, the song wrote itself. We recorded some vocals – Andrew a harsh growl, Ben a nasaly whine – took a photo of us surrounded by filth, and put it on the internet to hopefully make our friends laugh.
We had a ton of fun finishing this song, so we decided we’d do it again soon. Against our better judgement we adopted “These Stains Are Who I Am” as our band name. The “protagonist” of the song would become our on again-off again narrator in songs to come.
