Brendan Brown sits in front of about 20 small neon-orange rectangles, stacked neatly in rows of three and four. “That’s 0.05 percent of the hard drives that I have in my life,” the Wheatus frontman says proudly. To Brown, the drives are more than just terabytes of storage. They represent one of the most grueling yet gratifying endeavors of his band’s career: the rerecording of the entirety of their 2000 self-titled debut, a painstaking process undertaken in the name of owning their own music. Like many artists, Brown had become impatient with a copyright system that put his creative output in the control of a corporation that dropped Wheatus almost two decades ago. Keeping his rerecorded masters within arm’s reach might seem like overkill, but after years of radio silence from his previous label, Sony, on the whereabouts of Wheatus’s original master tapes, he isn’t taking any chances. “I keep the masters in my presence, because nobody’s getting them again,” he says.
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