I first met Thomas Nunziata, Jr. during the summer of 2003 while I was working at the American Red Cross in Plainfield, New Jersey. I had been told by my school, New York Military Academy that doing volunteer work would be in my favor in view of the school board. And so I started doing full time nine to five, five days a week at the Red Cross during the spring of 2002, as I was no longer in school. As I considered myself a full-time employee, I was a little skeptical of the summer newcomers that only did a few hours to look good before going to college. That summer of 2002, one those volunteers was Melanie Nunziata. Fast-forward to a year later in 2003, her brother Tom started volunteering there. By then I had become practically one of the permanent staff members and even got to pick the jobs that I wanted to do. Though the first time that I saw Tom, I wasn’t very impressed because I felt he was too optimistic and happy about life, which I quickly found out was one of his best qualities and a side of him that kept my moral up. We hit things off right away and started working together on projects for the Red Cross. We talked of music practically all summer.
Tom was in another band called Anuria.
The Tom & Alex Project was something that started during our jamming sessions in the summer of 2003. After a day at the Red Cross together, we often went back to his house and jammed. Some of those improvisation jams were on acoustic guitars and there was a specific one when we composed an entire set of joke songs about the Red Cross, in the presence on his girlfriend Sam Baime. It was from there that Tom and I decided that we needed to do a Red Cross EP. We dubbed it “Songs for the Red Cross of America”. Lyrics were mostly just us poking fun of the odd and boring jobs we were asked to do, like cleaning mannequins for CPR/First Aid classes, going through boxes of old clothes that were donated and setting them up for a charity buying, selling Red Cross water bottles at marathons, being fake victims during emergency rescue tryouts. We had as much fun working at the Red Cross as we did making those songs, so it was all on positive notes. We continued jamming for the remainder of 2003 and well into 2004, but as Tom was two years older than myself, he graduated J.P. Stevens High School in 2004 and went off to Rutgers University. Our EP never got recorded.
I always thought that Tom and I would continue jamming over time, so even when I moved to Montreal in July of 2006, if I had any ideas I would let him know. It must have been around October or November of 2006 when I first recorded some of these ideas. I was living with my grandmother and my recording equipment was very limited. On that specific day I was on my way out when a couple of ideas struck me. I was waiting on someone else so I quickly picked up Kelly and starting strumming away some songs that were a lot more groovy and poppy than the black metal and dark ambient that I had been doing during that phase. Being in a hurry, I didn’t take the time to set up all my recording wires and simply turned on the computer microphone and opened up Cakewalk Sonar and pressed record. The two samples of songs that I recorded that day as quick demos were “Groovy Song” and “Mysterious Asian Song”. I quickly put those in a folder for a hoped to be “Tom & Alex EP”.
I ended up moving back to Edison, New Jersey in mid December of 2006, at time time Tom was still attending Rutgers University. Sometime time around January 13th 2007, when I was recording Vision Lunar’s “Le demon de la lune“, I recorded another piece using practically the same effects and production. Looking back on the song, it sounds exactly like a Vision Lunar song, but at the time I felt that it was too different and I stored this new song, “Bouncing Harmonics Song”, in the “Tom & Alex Project EP” folder.
Although Tom and I would hang out a few more times during 2007, we never jammed together again and the ideas for songs started collecting dust.