The Barista Cycle was a self-commissioned song-cycle project. The idea was to build an album of songs around the names of the baristas at my favorite coffeehouse.* The style was intended to be "a cross between the Sex Pistols and the Beach Boys"... though the results fell far, far from that olympian goal.

I'll be developing this page a bit more later but here, in no particular order, are the Barista Cycle songs that I remember off hand...

Sherry (You Stole My Stereo)
Kristin Was Never Here
Christine, Christine (aka Too Much Trouble, Christine, Xteen)
Michelle (It's Easy to Be Sad)
Rachel
Amber Rose
Don't Let Dee Dee Dog You 'Round
Lisa
Melissa
JoZynn, JoZynn**

[links above go to A Year of Songs pages]

* Yes. That is my hand poised above my $40 classical guitar on the front page of my favorite coffeehouse's website. And, yes, once upon a time, I played there on a semi-regular basis, both as a folkie under my own name and as Frippenstein (aka Tranz Azul), an all-improv electronica act built around echo loops. (For that matter, I took a lot of the photos on their site and programmed their contact page for them, too.)

** I think you'll find that the Barista Cycle project had experienced considerable "mission drift" by the time JoZynn was added. Basically, after 8 or 9 fuzzed out and/or jangly tracks for the project, I just couldn't face any more. JoZynn might now be described as electoclash meets trip hop or something. The last song, Melissa, was a kind of bad post modern lounge thing. (Is "bad"redundant in that context?)