After Shaun had passed, once the dust had finally settled, someone came up with the idea of recording a cover of a Swans song that Shaun loved called "Goddamn the Sun" as sort of a tribute to our friend. The initial idea was to just have a big gang vocals like something the Polyphonic Spree would do where everyone is singing, but when we tried it in the live room at More Sound Studios, it just sounded like crap cause some people couldn't carry a note to save their lives. Some of the gang vocal chant track is left in there, but on playback it was evident that someone was going to have to sing an actual lead vocal line.
I had always hid my singing voice because I was very shy and anytime someone would discover that I could sing they always made such a big deal out of it, and that made me really uncomfortable. I've never liked attention, and I've always struggled with praise of any kind, some left over baggage from a childhood of divorce and a broken home.
I had come out of my shell a little bit at this point and was a little more comfortable throwing caution to the wind, so I put on my big boy pants and went out and sang a lead vocal line to a song I barely knew the lyrics to. I'd heard it before, but I had never cared enough for the Swans to learn the actual lyrics, so I was literally reading from a lyric sheet after listening to the song over and over a couple times to get the cadence in my head.
We tracked this song late into the night at More Sound, and it was nice to get everyone in the same room again for once after a bit of time had passed since his death. For some of us, it was the last time we would be in the same room again for a very long time. A few left that session to go on into their lives in completely different avenues than the rest of us. They're all out there somewhere, just existing as best they can given the circumstances and having been changed permanently by what we had all gone through together. We all dealt with death in our own ways, I suppose. Some far different than the way others did. I've always told people that our progression into adulthood was a sharp left turn that almost turned the car over, as apposed to most peoples gradual progression into adulthood. We grew up really fast after that. It was the end of the innocence and suddenly we were face to face with the fact that we are not as immortal as we had once believed in our childhood minds. One of us got taken down in a bad way, and we watched him die.

I made it a personal duty of mine to be the only to remind everyone of who he was. In my opinion, no one is allowed to forget Shaun. Not on my watch. I'm gonna throw him in your face and keep his memory alive until you beg me to stop, and even after that.
He loved music more than any of us. I was gifted his CD collection a bunch of years after he died, as his sister was sick of living among CD's. His collection was HUGE and it nearly tripled my own collection, but I keep them because he loved them. He spent every dime he ever had on music, and he could never get enough. He wanted it more than any of us. He was hungrier for it, and he felt it deeper, yet he got snuffed out and we got to carry on living. It sort of gave me a perspective of taking this serious and doing it to the best of my ability and taking this music thing as far as I can to carry him with me. His name is tattooed on my arm, and every record I play on has his logo, birthdate and death date on it in memory of him. It's just a way to take him with me on all those awesome stages and venues that I was lucky enough to play on, that he would have loved to play. So no, no one is allowed to forget him.
Music is true immortality if there every was such a thing. This music will go on into the centuries and be heard and discovered by people long after all of our bones are dust. We all know who Beethoven is and he made music before there was even recordings. Music is immortal, and it will always be a permanent mark on the world that we were once hear and we did something beautiful.