Back to the Beginning: Summer Demos 2001 (Now Streaming for the First Time)
Before NAVAR was a band… it was just me.
These are the very first songs I ever recorded in a studio — nine raw, emotional demos I laid down in the summer of 2001. It was the beginning of everything.
At the time, I was writing songs while training at 29 Palms in the Marines. It started as poetry — a way to deal with what I was feeling. Then those poems became lyrics.
When I got home, my mom knew I had the itch to be in a band. One day, she handed me a copy of the Penny Saver with a circled ad: “Band seeking singer – Canisteo, NY.” She looked at me and said, “Go for it.” So I did.
I joined the band and jumped right into gigging — learning tons of covers, playing shows, figuring out what it meant to perform with other musicians. It taught me a lot. But it didn’t feel like the path I was chasing. Everyone back then was playing Creed — you could walk into any bar and hear the same three songs.
But if someone wanted to hear your song? You were the only place they could get it.
That stuck with me. So I moved on. I knew I’d have to build something original from the ground up.
That’s when NAVAR was born.
Even though I was just a solo artist then, I went by NAVAR and lived it fully — I was PatofNAVAR on AIM, introduced myself that way, and launched Navar.net, where I started learning the art of shameless self-promotion.
I devoured every Guerilla Marketing for Musicians book I could find, and wore out my copy of Everything You Need to Know About the Music Business. I was obsessed.
At the time, I lived in a pink house in Fillmore, NY with my sister Star, her husband Adam, and their son Hunter. I spent countless hours in that bedroom, trying to wring meaning out of heartbreak through chords and lyrics.
Adam once told me he could hear me through the walls as I worked out every line of “Meant to Be” — from the first rough idea to the final take. That encouragement was the spark I needed.
I eventually moved in with my friends Ron Cartwright and Michael Brodfuehrer in a tiny house in Short Tract, NY. That house became the emotional engine behind much of this music. I recorded bedroom demos on my iMac using SoundEdit 16 and just kept writing.
During that time, I was connected to 8th Tank Battalion, H&S Company in Rochester. One of my fellow Marines in Comm, Mike Nowak, mentioned his dad Bruce Nowak had a home studio in Buffalo — My House Productions. They mostly worked with polka legends, but Mike and Bruce were kind enough to invite me to record whenever I was ready.
So I did.
We recorded these nine demos in two chunks, all in the summer of 2001. I burned CDs and handed them out to anyone who would listen. They were meant to be the launchpad for what NAVAR would become.
One of those songs, “Anyhow,” was written while I was on firewatch during a CAX training exercise out in the Mojave Desert. I sang it over and over in my head, afraid I’d lose the idea, and eventually scribbled it into the front cover of my copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Choke.”
That copy was later given as a gift to Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind.
We recorded “Anyhow” in just a few takes — like everything else on the demos. You’ll hear a tiny digital pop in the final version. That’s just the best rip I could find from the original CD.
Later in 2002, we recorded a full album with a full band — again with Mike and Bruce Nowak. But I’ll save that story for another post.
For now, I’m excited (and a little terrified) to finally release Summer Demos 2001 into the world.
No click tracks. No tuning. No filters. Just me and a guitar.
Almost 25 years later… I’m still chasing songs the same way.
Thanks to everyone who supported me then — and everyone still sticking with me now.
-PB
📸 Early NAVAR Days Photo Gallery
Back in 2001, I became weirdly obsessed with the idea of building the band’s logo out of real matchsticks. I spent hours arranging them on paper, then used a flatbed scanner to digitize the logo. It was gritty and a little ridiculous — which made it perfect.
All the photos from this era were taken on disposable cameras, developed at 1-hour photo labs, and scanned in one-by-one. It was a different world back then — no filters, no cloud, just whatever you managed to capture and preserve.
As I continue to dig through old hard drives, shoeboxes, and binders full of burned CDs, I’ll keep adding more photos and artifacts here. There’s a lot of history — and a lot of heart — in those stacks. I don’t know if anyone else cares, but it’s fun for me to look back on my journey so I hope you don’t mind indulging me a bit.
