What began as a platform for live vocal performance has grown into the production infrastructure for one of the most unusual creative ecosystems in contemporary independent music. George Crooney — performer, researcher, remix artist — uses Soundtrap as the primary studio for an interconnected body of work spanning the Covid Tapes, Fishing in the Podstream sessions, collaborative recordings with Ian Bruce, the six-disc Travels in Intertextuality box set, and the ongoing Seven Inning Stretch lyric video series.
The sections of this site document each era in sequence: the Box Set and Vinyl Record as foundational objects; the pandemic-era Covid Tapes; the Podstream Studios Vancouver sessions; the Travels in Intertextuality '24 playlist assembled June 21, 2024 as a direct response to the AI shock of the day before; the Seven Inning Stretch lyric video series begun April 2025; the Seven Game Series; and Route 66, the January 2026 onramp that loops the whole travelogue back to its beginning.
Between 2005 and 2011, a series of live recordings accumulated — nineteen video captures and one audio-only document of The National performing in Vancouver, Oakland, Cambridge, and beyond. The archive spans the band's most formative years: from early club shows through the period of Alligator, Boxer, and High Violet.
The central research question — what are the comparative value propositions for The National Archives, and how can they be explored, demonstrated, and strategically evaluated? — drives the applied research program now housed at thecommodore.com. AI-assisted audio restoration, multimodal production workflows, and a growing body of commercialization precedents shape the investigative frame.
The inciting incident is precise. On June 20, 2024, while cleaning out the Podstream Studios space in Vancouver, the Udio AI music generation app was prompted to create "a crooner song." The result — "Sweet Serenade," a Sinatra-esque vocal replication of a jazz standard that had never existed — was not impressive in the way AI demonstrations usually are. It was unsettling. If the register of the human crooner could be replicated that completely, what remained of the craft?
The answer assembled itself the following day. Not as an argument but as an act: a seven-hour playlist, Travels in Intertextuality '24, posted to the new George Crooney YouTube page on June 21, 2024. Songs sung, songs studied, voices impersonated, voices loved. The Mark Lanegan tribute sessions of the preceding months already in the archive. The St. Vincent recording from June 11 bookending one end. The AI-generated "Sweet Serenade" opening the other.
The same studio cleanout that triggered the Udio shock revealed three other things simultaneously: the old IAT 203 course archive from SFU, the experimental "Secret Documents" Masters of Reality playlists from 2007, and the broader portfolio of concert recordings from the graduate research years — including the first National shows. Four discoveries, one afternoon, one seven-hour response.
Umberto Eco's concept of the open work — the text that requires a reader to complete it, that generates meanings its author didn't plan and can't fully own — gives the playlist its theoretical frame. But the frame was earned before it was named. What a crooner does, night in and night out, is exactly this: every song already belongs to someone else, every cover is an act of reading, every impersonation is an interpretation of an interpretation. The open work goes all the way down.
The playlist is not a composition. It is not a setlist. It is closer to what the 2006 MASc thesis called an "enhanced podcast" — the Desolation Sound System — now expanded from audio into a YouTube object with visual content and remixed layers overtop of the full seven-hour arc. James Joyce's permission: let the playlist flow from song to song while making good use of empty spaces. Eco's framework: understand why it means what it means, and hold lightly the question of how much the author's own reading counts.
The work continued through February 2025. The final version — the Accordion Files, the expanded and enhanced edition — became the visual object from which all subsequent Seven Inning Stretch episodes derive. The playlist that started as a response to an AI shock became the infrastructure for everything that followed.
What a crooner does, night in and night out, is interpret. Not just perform — interpret. Every song already belongs to someone else: a writer, a first recording, a voice the room thinks it knows. The crooner's job is to make it mean something in this room, tonight, with this crowd. Eco called this the open work — the text that requires a reader to complete it. The crooner is that reader, made audible.
The Travels in Intertextuality '24 playlist is my attempt at a written version of the same thing: eight hours of music assembled on a single day, June 21 2024, as an act of interpretation rather than composition. Songs I have sung, songs I have studied, voices I have impersonated, voices I have loved. Joyce gave me the permission to let the playlist flow from song to song while making good use of empty spaces. Eco gave me the framework to understand why it means what it means — and why what I think it means is only one reading among many.
The author's interpretation of his own work, for what it's worth.
The story begins in 1989, in Campbell River, BC. A sixteen-year-old sees the "The Blue Garden" video on MuchMusic and orders the album from his local record store. It arrives on cassette. The cult value is immediate and intuitive — not because the album is obscure, but because finding it feels like evidence of a particular kind of perception. The value isn't only in the record. It's in the recognition that you are someone who could hear what was in it when others hadn't.
This is how cult value actually works: not as innocent affection for a thing, but as a relationship between the perceiver and the object that includes a self-perception — the sense that you can see value where others cannot, or have not yet. When the album later accumulates mainstream recognition, that recognition doesn't reach back and grant the same relationship to later arrivals. It confirms the early judgment while diluting the distinction. The cult listener knows this. It's part of what being a cult listener means.
The album is the Masters of Reality self-titled debut, known to fans by the gothic painting on its cover. Its producer is Rick Rubin. The band actually named The Cult would later bring Goss in as a producer. These connections accumulate at the periphery of the artist's intentions, amplifying the cult value from outside — which is Eco's point about productive incoherence: cult objects attract more meaning than their makers designed them to hold.
When a CD reissue surfaces years later in a Granville Street used shop, the track order is wrong. Not factually wrong — but experientially wrong. The cassette was the primary artifact of first encounter, and everything since is a reissue in the deepest sense: a later version that can be acquired but not experienced for the first time. The cult listener reconstructs the cassette's sequence anyway. This is the competence Eco describes — fans recognizing each other through shared navigation of a completely furnished world.
By 2007, teaching IAT 203 (Cultural Icons and Popular Art) at SFU and having just returned from presenting the Metaphrames paper at a conference in Australia, Professor Playlist assembles The Secret Documents: 2007 — a double album titled after Joseph Conrad's spy novels, the cassette's track order restored, eighteen years of deep relationship organized into a curatorial act. The Conrad titles are themselves a cult gesture: they require competence to decode, and reward those who have it.
The Secret Documents were rediscovered during the June 2024 studio cleanout — among a cluster of four simultaneous discoveries that included the IAT 203 archive, the St. Vincent recording sessions, and the Udio AI shock that triggered Travels in Intertextuality '24 on June 21. Their visual logic was carried forward directly into the Seven Inning Stretch EP2 lyric video in April 2025. When The Archer drops on March 28 of that year, the tools are ready, the relationship is 36 years old, and the episode writes itself.
"What are the comparative value propositions for The National Archives and how can they be explored, demonstrated, and strategically evaluated?"
Precedents: A Skin, A Night · Mistaken for Strangers · A Lot of Sorrow · Rome 2024