My friend Jen sings. And she writes some of her own songs. So I forced her to record them for me, using my laptop (PowerBook G4 12") and a PowerWave with Garage Band. There were some technical difficulties with the gain, for which I'm sorry. I'm trying to fix this so I can re-record her. But in the meantime, I bring you...

Music by Jennifer Sheffield

You can listen to a track online by using the controls that (at least theoretically) appear beneath the name. Or you can download a track by control-clicking on its download link (if you're a Mac user) or right-clicking on its its download link (if you're a PC user). If that doesn't work (hey, different browsers and OSes do different things...) try doing whatever you normally do to save the contents of a link.

Marriage Protection Week © October 2003 download

Note from Jen: This song commemorates two political events, actually. One is "Marriage Protection Week" (Oct 12-18, 2003), formed by Presidential Proclamation in 2003, and as far as I can tell, *not* repeated in 2004 (I guess the Federal Marriage Amendment was enough). The other reference is to Poetry against the War day (February 12, 2003), formed as a result of the cancellation of a White House symposium that Laura Bush had put together honoring "Poetry and the American Voice" as represented by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman (anti-war Americans all). She cancelled the symposium upon hearing that many of the poets invited were planning to collect and read anti-war poetry at the event, just over a month before the US declared war on Iraq. Said she didn't want a literary event to become a political one. Too late...

Note from Jen: This song is gratefully dedicated to my frosh and sophomore hallmates, particularly to Heather Arnold (who challenged me to write it), and to the memory of Mandy Davis (1971-2003).

...and then, there are all these effects one can put on a song after it's been recorded...

Marriage Protection Freak - arrangement ©July 2, 2004, about 1:00 in the morning download (with Diva effects and bad maracas added to make it sound As Awful As Possible---I couldn't resist)