Zach, I have your record. I have apparently had it for at least ten years, which means I have now owned your record longer than you ever did, although I understand that is not generally how loans work. As best as I can remember, you loaned me Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee shortly after I received J Dilla’s Donuts from Vinyl Me, Please in March of 2015. I can prove the second half of that sentence because I still have the emails announcing Donuts as the March record, apologizing for a delay with my “Dilla package,” and finally telling me that it shipped on March 17. The first half is fuzzier because it depends on my memory, which is not a source anyone should cite without independent corroboration, but I am pretty sure you heard that I was getting into Dilla and told me I needed to hear this strange record you owned. Then I borrowed it for eleven years.

The record itself is wonderfully nerdy. Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee was made in 2007 by a young British producer named Nathan Jenkins, better known as Bullion, who had become obsessed with Pet Sounds around the same time he was discovering how much of the hip-hop he loved had been produced by J Dilla. After Donuts came out, he started hearing Pet Sounds differently and decided to rebuild it as though Dilla had gotten hold of the original sessions. It is usually described as a mashup, but Bullion says that is not quite right. He did not simply put Beach Boys songs over Dilla beats. He chopped up material from the Pet Sounds sessions, programmed his own drums, sampled Dilla’s voice in a few places, and tried to reproduce the loose, crooked rhythmic feeling of Dilla’s production. He made the whole thing on an old Mac using Logic 6 and a MIDI keyboard, and somehow MJ Cole ended up mastering it. It circulated as a free download, on MySpace, through music blogs, and on CD-Rs Bullion handed to people outside record stores, which is about as perfectly 2007 as an album’s origin story can possibly be.

The physical record I have is even stranger because Bullion did not release it. Somebody bootlegged his already legally questionable tribute onto vinyl in 2009, put it in a plain black sleeve with a green sticker, and printed “FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY” on the label to make it look official and mysterious. Bullion later said he did not feel he had much room to complain because his entire project was built from material he did not own, but he did point out that the bootleggers did a sloppy job and even changed the title by adding “Bullion Presents.” They pressed it again in 2015, so I cannot tell yet whether Zach’s copy is the original 2009 edition or the repress. I remember it didn’t look new when I borrowed it, which makes me suspect it may be the earlier one, but that is an inference rather than evidence and apparently this post is now serious record scholarship.

The most Zach thing about all of this is that I found a list he posted in 2016 naming ten of his favorite albums. Two of them were the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and J Dilla’s Donuts. Of course he owned the obscure unofficial record that smashes those two albums together. It may be the most Zach Malm object I could possibly have discovered on my shelf. So Zach, if you are out there and you want your record back, you have to comment on this post. Those are my terms. I think they are extremely reasonable considering that I have now been taking care of it for nearly twice as long as you did.