rjhugginstuff / Selected work
Music
Audio-Only Recordings
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Bayou and Me
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Far From Home
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Ordinary Way
Videos
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Just One Drink
I don't do anything special to my hair. It's kinda like wolf hair – it's stiff and does what it wants. I don't have much say in the matter. I was just beginning to mature as a songwriter when I wrote this song about dwelling on short-term love affairs. It was sometime after 1994 (during the taping of The Kathleen Recs, just before getting involved in a band project with Adrian Darter and James Collins), but definitely sometime before I roomed with Jen and Jenny (which I think was 1998). Thanks again, girls, for the awesome guitar case – it's still my one and only.
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Back to Your House
c 1992. Sometimes it's hard to remember why love failed; sometimes we never actually know why.
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Brush
c 1993. Brush used to be called Arkansas Brush, but the song's about, like, when you just get a little taste of something, so I shortened it. It was inspired by possibilities rather than actual events.
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Amy
c 1998. Inspired by three Amys. I believed in romance, and spiritual purity in the face of seemingly hopeless circumstances, and the power of love to inspire personal self-redemption.... Amys have always taught me to be real.
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There is Only One
c 1994. I wrote this after processing a serious foray into organized Christianity and coming out of it with a bad taste in my mouth for organization, but with my spirituality intact – on some subtle level.
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Can't Buy Me Love
c 2008. There was a time when I referred to my guitar-based music as “front porch acoustic folk rock”. This song came near the end of that era when stomping my foot on a hardwood floor with plenty of crawlspace was still part of my heartbeat.
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Sampler: The Kathleen Recs
...are cassette tape recordings made in 1995 on a Fostex 4-track/mixer I'd picked up from North-West Arkansas musician Derek Van Lynn for $100. These are some of my best recordings, even though they're hissy analogs. I was in the process of re-mastering them all digitally when my PC's motherboard toasted out; the project sits dormant on an old hard drive until I can get the technology to harvest the files and get them back into play. The Sampler, here, was a live mix-down: I made notes on paper and tweaked the levels and balance as the recordings played into a compact disc recorder. This file was lifted from the cd.
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Room Without a View
This song externalizes my feelings about the unexpected death of a friend, and the friends who encircled her. I hadn't realized that YouTube was new when I made this one. Reluctant to expose my identity, I was posting under the pseudonym “R.J. Thisper” (“Thisper” was short for “This person”). I had no idea that I was one of the pioneers of multi-tracking peer-to-peer video and long-distance collaboration. Select the “Pioneer” link under this video to see the 2007 project I did when a bass player going by the handle “The Darkener” contacted me about sitting in on this song. In that year, YouTube automatically converted all videos to 240p (320x240 pixels in 4:3 ratio, like old tv screens), but soon after this video the platform introduced “high definition” 720p (1280x720 pixels in 16:9) to match the aspect ratio of the movies of that era. I wrote out the sheet music for the violin part, for which you may find a link a bit later.
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Lightning Rod
Written in late 1999 or early 2000 and included on the Kathleen Recs, this video wasn't made until 2007 and posted under a pseudonym. YouTube was in its infancy, and the native resolution was still 240p (320x240 pixels – 108 times SMALLER than 4K UHD resolution). The titles were updated in 2026. Lightning Rod is about the transcendental experience of suddenly becoming awake to the real world and the responsibility the experience seems to bear.
rjhugginstuff
Tap the Source
Art, music, moving images, and words.
Available for commissions and creative opportunities.
ryanjhuggins@protonmail.com