Jesse Rivest Music

My first official album, Seventeen Oh-Two Oh-Six, was released to online platforms in May 2006... twenty years ago! Am I celebrating? Not really, but I am acknowledging; so much time has passed, and as that music has been slipping more and more behind me, I have been stepping further and further onward.

The other day I quickly made a few videos to mark the occasion. I chose two songs that I still play from the album, albeit differently than how I did that February 17th, so long ago. I recorded the first take of each song and went ahead with that...

"These are my songs, and this is how I performed them on May 19, 2026."

You'll know—whether you own a physical copy of the CD or you've read the release page—that, although I recorded the songs that cold, winter day in February, I didn't offically release the album until May 2026. That's why I'm ackowledging twenty years in May rather than a few months back.

The third video I made is of me talking quite candidly, unscripted, for ten minutes about this album and that time in my life. At the time of this writing, the three-video series is up at YouTube.

I realized recently that the Wayback Machine has been archiving my site since 2004. I think I archived the various stages that my website has gone through over the decades, but not with intermediate snapshots like the Wayback Machine has. I found a particular snapshot of what was my discography page at this particular time of interest; it has a brief, detailed timeline of the process for this record. Quite cool! I was tempted by nostalgia to spend more time there; alas, time is too short these days for such dwelling.

(As I mention in the talking video of the series, I regret to have used the word "tits" so much at that time in my life; you'll see I used it wildly even in the timeline mentioned above. When you release music into the world, and doubly when you publish words for the world to read, there is no going back on any of it.)

Although the album came out officially in May that year, I was already selling them to friends and (dare I say) fans from the day they arrived (which, according to the timeline, was April 26). I glanced through my emails from that time period and had to smile at my excitement and enthusiasm. Were you one of the fine folk emailing or meeting with me at that time and on that topic? If so, please contact me for a dose of nosalgia. (In the past year I received an email from Tina in Nelson, and it was wonderful to hear from her.)

I was selling and signing those CDs for quite a few months in Canada, until I arrived in Wellington, NZ, at the beginning of October. I schlepped a big box or two of the CDs with me; they didn't sell so well there and, ultimately, I lost over 200 of them to time and space. And that's okay 😉.