Ossian's Ride was the first band I played in, mostly with other people I knew from university:

Darcy Burner

keyboards

Michael Burner

drums

Carl Anderson

guitars

Michael "Tox" Donahue

bass

Tania Ruiz

vocals.

I think we at least rehearsed with Ben Cash as a vocalist as well, though my memory is now too hazy to remember if he sang at our first gig (where we had a different drummer who's name I have now, embarrassingly, forgotten!).

Anyway, Ossian's Ride existed primarily in rehearsals -- though with a gig or two in there! -- between the second half of 1993 and mid-1995. We were not terribly skilled :) but I think we wrote some cool songs.

We actually went into a studio and recorded a bunch of originals, though this was in the days before cheap CDR blanks and burners (let alone MP3s!), so we never got more than a handful copies of our demo disc (gloriously, if unwieldily, titled Heavy Celtic Space Punk) pressed to use as promos. I haven't put any of those recordings online here, since I kinda feel I ought to have permission from the other band members, and damned if I know where Tox has got to these days! (But if I put one song up, it would probably be "Words to the Wind" -- in the meantime, I'm working on a new version, the recording for which is still very much "in progress", but here it is anyway!)

Some of the songs I had written for Ossian's Ride I later recorded as part of my Scylding project -- the Scylding song titled "Ossian's Ride" being a bit of a giveaway there -- and Tania sang on all the Scylding demos. I also wrote "The Colour Out of Space" for OR, though there wasn't time to include that even in the Scylding sessions, and the "beginning sketch of "The Colour Out of Space" that I have here is recorded in early 2006. I've made a very rough demo (w/o vox) for "Thunderbird" (formerly known as "Herman the German"), which was also written in the OR days (I distinctly remember composing the verse riff whilst walking across Harvard Yard on the way to my then-job as sysadmin in Widener!).

Alas, most of what we wrote but didn't record is now probably lost for ever (thank you, dodgy memory!), which is a shame since Tox had come up with some cool songs: "Captain Napalm" (the lyrics to which I discovered preserved in an old LiveJournal post, rather like some prehistoric insect in amber), "Attack of the 50-foot Man in the Rubber Godzilla Suit", and "Hordes of the Things" (which had the most stonking bass line, which I haven't forgotten, and which I will rip off some day! :)

Somewhere on disk I have some of Darcy's sketches for a song "Ragnarok"; gotta do something with those eventually. I vaguely recall getting together with her (and Mike) sometime around 1999 and writing/recording a new song -- but, ehh, can't remember how it went! She and Mike have been kinda distracted by having kids, running for Congress, that sort of stuff ....