This CD is the first of many things in my music collection. It’s the first one I ever (as an adult) that on its release date I raced to the music shop to purchase it and immediately listen to it the moment I got home. It’s also the first one I have had signed by the members of the band. In addition, it’s the first one I ever had to replace due to it getting excessively scratched after years of rough handing.

This is the album that BNL was supporting during the New Year’s Eve 1996 show where I first encountered Paula Cole, and it really was the soundtrack to my first several months of living in NYC after moving up there in July 1996. I can still easily recall listening to this album on my Panasonic Shockman player when walking along the east side of Central Park in the evening while walking back to my apartment on Yorkville section of Manhattan from my job just off of Times Square. While “The Old Apartment” became the band’s first US hit, it wasn’t one of my favorite tracks at the time. Those were “Shoe Box,” “If I Should Fall,” “Break Your Heart,” and “Same Thing.” However, in the years since, my favorite track off the album, and one of my all-time favorite deep cuts by anyone, has become “Just a Toy” — a dark anthropomorphic dive into the mind the marionette Gepetto made just before Pinnochio and the jealousy he harbors against his younger brother.

The other interesting thing about this album is that was released as an Enhanced CD, meaning that it was encoded with Mac & PC software that allowed you to interact with additional bonus material when you put it in your computer. Unfortunately, the experience of using the Enhanced CD features is long gone as neither operating system allows you to play that software anymore. In fact, the Mac OS doesn’t even recognize the file system used on the CD, so it’s impossible to even check out the assorted sound and video files that the software used (this was something I was still able to do roughly 10-15 years ago.)