Restored 2026
Inside the Music She Documented
Robin Vaughan occupied a particularly revealing place in Boston music: she wrote songs and performed them while also documenting the scene around her. Her byline appeared in Boston music journalism, but she was never looking at the culture exclusively from the outside. The bands, clubs, records and musicians she covered belonged to the same working community in which her own music developed.
Vaughan’s recording trail passes through The Ex-Girlfriends, whose 1990 cassette EP Afraid of Dogs preserved an early set of her compositions, and into The Sextons. With Jennifer Smith on vocals and keyboards, Matt Ashare on lead guitar and vocals, John Neidhart on bass and vocals, and Roger Thom on drums, The Sextons gave Vaughan’s writing a full electric setting built from layered voices, keyboards and guitars.
In 1999 One Way released the seven-song Sextons CD Too Far Gone, digitally mastered at Tape Exchange by Marisa T. Dery. Its sequence “Too Far Gone,” “Boom,” “Hammerman,” “Dissolve,” “Deny,” “Face Down” and “Tug Boat” was also preserved as a complete block on the One Way compilation Boston Retroactive. The compilation title described more than a collection. One Way was already looking backward in order to keep overlooked Boston recordings in circulation, anticipating the recovery work Motherlode and Roadkill Revival would later make explicit.
Vaughan’s later band Velveteen carried the line forward. “Big Invitation,” written by Vaughan, appeared on One Way’s 2002 compilation Dig the Boston Underground, where the label identified her earlier work with The Ex-Girlfriends and The Sextons. Together, those recordings form a small but coherent catalog: songs scattered across groups and compilations, now reunited through the artist who wrote them.
