VTM archive
the music of Vanessa Rose Marcussen Meier 1987 · 2007
Archive changelog

63 updates to the archive, in order.

Every recovered track, every lyric transcription, every documented album, logged as it arrived. Most of these entries exist because somebody kept something for twenty years and finally had a place to send it.

    • Documented Let Me Love You Now, a title she named in her own writing on September 24, 2003, when she was 16. No lyrics or audio, so it joins the other songs we know only by name.
    • A new way to hear everything. The home page now has a Play All Songs button that shuffles the whole archive, and each song opens its own page as it plays, so her lyrics and the notes on a recording arrive along with the music. Each new song settles into place as it arrives rather than cutting straight in. The button beside the track counter in the player turns that on and off at any point, and browsing anywhere on your own leaves the music playing and stops the pages from turning. The player now remembers where you have been, too: skipping back returns to the song you actually just heard rather than whichever track happened to sit beside it in the list, and shuffle works its way through the whole archive before it repeats anything. Two smaller things alongside it. Tapping a row on the albums page starts that album and opens its page at the same time, and where a song has no recovered artwork, its sleeve carries the album's name in full the way the cover on the home page does.
    • A personal note. These past months have been spent reaching out to Vanessa's friends, family, and old acquaintances, trying to complete this archive as fully as it can be. As you might imagine, that work brought back every stage of grief you feel when you lose someone, even twenty years on: happiness, sadness, anger, regret, embarrassment, and a good deal in between. With all of that said, I believe I have now done everything I can to memorialize her. Thank you to everyone who kept her songs safe and returned them here.
    • Simplified how to reach the archive: email is now the single best way to get in touch, on the contribute page and in the download.
    • Added a portrait of Vanessa to her life page.
    • Polished the site's dark mode: lifted the page background, darkened the navigation, and fixed several low-contrast buttons and panels so everything stays readable at night.
    • Added a proper themed page for broken or mistyped links, so a wrong turn still feels like part of the archive.
    • Tidied the pages for songs we know she made but haven't recovered yet, removing a redundant label so each one reads more cleanly.
    • Added site-wide search: every track, lyric, album, and documented title is now findable from a single search box.
    • Track pages now follow along with the music, highlighting each line of lyrics in time as a song plays.
    • Every downloadable MP3 now carries full title, artist, and album tags, so her songs display properly in any music player.
    • Linked the archive to the new Bliss Corporation Forum memorial site, the dance-production community where Nessa first shared her music with friends.
    • Added the lyrics for And I: Vanessa's stated favorite of her own songs, written June 2004. Audio still not recovered, but the full three-stanza lyric is now preserved
    • Added Simply Nessa as a documented album entry: the first album she finished on computer (May 18, 2004). Tracklist never published, no audio recovered
    • Re-ordered the Genesis, Silence, The Way, Vantastic, and Indifference album tracklists to match Vanessa's own stated track order from her completion announcements (the website's previous orderings had drifted)
    • Filled in missing tracks on the album order arrays: The Way now lists Walk With Me, You and I, So Alone (Demo); Vantastic lists Locked, Time Stands Still, Air, Tomorrow, One More Time; Indifference lists Another Night and That's the Way It Goes (VTM Spin Around Remix); Silence lists Behind the Mask (165 BPM Remix)
    • Corrected Dreamworld year from 2005 to 2007 (its only recovered track is dated 2007); corrected Electronically Challenged year from 2004 to 2007 (its tracks span 2005-2007)
    • Added the original closing line to the Have Faith lyrics, present in her earliest June 2004 draft and dropped from the version she shared three days later
    • Updated the Hands of Time annotation: she first demoed the song in March 2007, then submitted it to the American Idol songwriting competition that April
    • Documented four work-in-progress demos (1hardcore, 5fasttrance, softtrance, newertrance1) she shared in 2005 under their working filenames; identified 4duneish1 as the working filename of That's the Way It Goes before she titled it
    • Added Genesis as an album entry (2003, ten known track titles, no audio recovered yet) with its track list now live on the Genesis album page
    • Added lyrics for Have Faith: recovered from a June 2004 blisscoforum post where she posted the song as a work in progress
    • Added a July 2004 alternate closing verse for Bring You Down, posted to blisscoforum several months after her original December 2003 draft
    • Expanded the Musical Influences section with 20+ additional artists she posted about listening to between 2003 and 2006, including Gabry Ponte, Gigi D'Agostino, Darude, Kraftwerk, Orbital, Fischerspooner, and Autechre
    • Added lyrics for Fall Apart: chorus preserved from a January 2007 journal entry
    • Documented 8 additional remix and demo variants in the song list from a blisscoforum discography pass
    • Added Track 15: recovered via John Alan Fessel
    • Added I Wish: recovered via John Alan Fessel
    • Archive launched with 53 recovered tracks, 75+ documented titles