How her music survived.

What the platforms took

In 2018, MySpace announced that a server migration had lost "all music, photos, and videos" uploaded before 2016. For a generation of producers (many of them amateurs who had treated MySpace as their primary distribution), this was a catastrophe, quietly absorbed. Vanessa's page was among the ones emptied.

LiveJournal's decay was slower but similar. Her journal posts from those years survive only in scattered fragments. The Bliss Corporation Forum where she posted early tracks largely went quiet by the late 2000s and the hosted audio with it. By the late 2010s, even someone Googling her name had a hard time finding anything online.

The fan sites

Part of the paper trail survives from the other end of the story, too. Starting in February 2004, Todd ran a series of fan sites for her. The first called itself "VTM the Unofficial FanSite"; a later version quietly upgraded to "the official VTM fansite." The backups still exist, and the news log on the first one reads like a release calendar. The site went up on February 18, 2004. How It Feels was posted the next day, A Higher State the day after that, a preview of Summer Night on the 21st, and over the following ten days Wonder Why went from preview to finished while March of the Gabbers and a second Positive Side demo arrived. Every demo that page hosted, including a recording of her on violin, is in this archive now.

The demos page carried an apology: "All sounds have been recorded to be streamed to a 56k connection, so the quality has been slightly lowered." That's why some of the earliest files here are small and rough. They were bounced for dial-up. A half-finished 2006 rebuild of the site survives too, with a placeholder where the biography should have gone: "I will have nessa write her own biograpnhy or something. whatever......" She never got to write it.

What friends kept

What hadn't been deleted was what she had actually given to people. She was prolific with CDs, and CD-burner culture in the early 2000s meant that if someone liked you, they got a disc with your songs on it. Those discs were scattered across living rooms and closets and old storage boxes for twenty years.

The archive you're reading started with the 51 tracks Todd Hertzelle had carried with him, computer to computer, hard drive to hard drive, for twenty years so they wouldn't be lost. In January 2026, John Alan Fessel, a friend of hers from those years who had collaborated with her on lyrics, began checking the site against CDs of her music he'd burned almost twenty years earlier, and sending over every track the archive didn't have: short experimental pieces, demos, a track labeled only "Track 15" from a CD he burned in 2006. By early February the archive was up to 60 tracks.

Back in 2007, Amanda Miller had quietly gathered every song of Vanessa's she could and put them on a USB drive, not for any specific purpose, just so that something would survive. She kept that drive safe for almost twenty years. When Todd asked about it in 2026, she went and got it and sent everything over. Twenty-six mp3s arrived on March 4. A substantial part of what's in this archive, including full albums and higher-quality masters of tracks that otherwise only existed in lower bitrates, is here because of that one decision. The archive jumped from 60 to its current 86 in a single afternoon.

This is my favorite song of hers. When I need a good pick-me-up, I still put it on repeat. Amanda Miller · on Time Goes By

How most of this survived

Everything here survived because somebody kept it on purpose. Three people, three ways: Todd carried his folder of her songs across every computer he owned. Amanda filled a USB drive in 2007 and kept it safe. John held onto the CDs he'd burned when the two of them were writing together. In 2007, the internet was still young enough that "saving" a file meant something physical, and Vanessa was generous enough with her music that a lot of people had copies to save. That's how she's still here to listen to.

The files bear this out. Some of the MP3s in this archive still carry the internal stamp of the encoder that wrote them: LAME 3.93, a version released in December 2002. Tags can be rewritten; that stamp sits inside the audio stream itself. What you're hearing is the render she made on her own computer, carried forward twenty years on other people's shelves.

A substantial portion of her catalogue is almost certainly still out there too, on a laptop somebody upgraded from, a backup drive in a closet, a CD tucked into a yearbook or a move-out box. The Still searching page lists 71 titles we know existed but haven't found audio for. If you knew her and kept anything, a folder, a disc, a single file you don't remember downloading, please reach out. Nothing is too small.

What we're doing with what's back

The working rule is preservation, not curation. Every track we recover goes on the site whether it's a finished record, a thirty-second sketch, or a demo with a rough vocal. Her sketches are worth hearing as sketches; the rough vocals are her voice, and there isn't going to be more of it. Everything is downloadable. The full collection is also mirrored at archive.org as a belt-and-suspenders backup.

If the archive grew by twenty-five tracks in a single afternoon because one person remembered a USB drive, it stands to reason there are other afternoons waiting.