A collection of sounds from across time and space. Creatures from forgotten vaults, tunes fighting for the light of day far too long.

Kick It (With Me) [Demo]: An HDH and mid-late 60s Norman Whitfield inflected tune and chord chart that beamed in on a ray of early spring sunshine on a crowded deck in Gulf Shores, AL. a hook that wouldn’t stop playing in my head until it was fully written. First time on the heavy cherry wood bass on many of our songs, while still using round wound strings, and the joy of rediscovering the bass after nearly 20 years away is palpable. A fast and furious demo production that merits hearing in its own right.

Self Destruct: Jazz fest 2014, lyrics written to collaborate with Kebrodero Olivia’s “Yellow Cherry Fantasy” after the first date with my wife. Then Ben got ahold of Sergio’s tracks, and this happened! Guitar line and vocal hooks repurposed to the new vision. There is an entirely different live funk version of this song that will surface at some point...a snippet appears on Soundproof Kitten Earmuffs.

On Sparrow Hills: In early 2016, my sister requested some music for a podcast. As SWB had recently had an intense rhythm section tracking session, I thought we'd knock it out in no time. I laidd down the tracks you hear here in about an hour, thinking Kris would embellish. Little did we know band progress would be delayed by extreme life events. It was never "finished." We recently unearthed this from the vault and realized it was imperfect but immensely shareable. Of course, it is plastered with the influence of Brian Eno, an allegation I cannot deny, but do embrace.

Last Night on Planet Disco: One of Ben's first projects in Logic ended up becoming this 4-part odyssey. Behind the scenes, an archaeological site. A chord progression written on a new ukelele on a beach in Moloka’i played into a portable cassette player in Honolulu transformed into an entirely new and haunting composition in McCall, ID. A poem improvised in minutes at the end of a session with a plane waiting in Boise, in a rounding process inspired by medicine. An Irish folk song inspired by the songs my grandpa and uncles used to sing. Field recordings from the beach and coffee farming mountains of Nicaragua. An outro developed in Moscow, ID and layered with autotuned improvisations in San Francisco, CA. A vision shepherded and resuscitated across years and states by Ben into this final incarnation. Closing the book on this one is profoundly significant for the band.

Letting Go: Before there was SWB, there was Xiphoid Process (2004-2005), a project devoted to weirdness and bombastic sonic exploration. We shuttled back and forth from Bellingham to Seattle, laying down tracks on a Roland VS 840 (a fine piece of equipment I sometimes miss). It was our first foray into distance collaboration. We approached it with the enthusiasm and confidence of our early 20's, disregarding song structure and blithely ignorant of recording technique. This one was arranged and recorded in Jeff’s Basement, where we pulled out all the bells, whistles, and assorted instruments in various states of repair. There may also be an extended version with an outro with thousands of birds, a Brian Wilson inspired vocal choir, and the screams of the damned. We’ll never tell.

Jealous of Angels: A ghostly story-song that evolved on its journey from Atlanta, GA (hatched as a skeletal iPhone memo of a very out of tune piano) to McCall, ID to New Orleans, LA. Duet vocals from the legendary Dr. Sarah Candler. A middle 8 graced by Jack Joshua’s acoustic bass, a first or second take composition that in the context of the chord chart pointed our way forward as a band. Blue Spark reporting for duty. Orchestrations and re-chordal heavy lifting by Ben. We lost files somewhere close to finishing this for Cosmic Urchin, and this remastered version is stitched together from several bounces, reasonably complete.

Soundproof Kitten Earmuffs: Cosmic Urchin, the 2015 EP that we were able to salvage from Post-Apocalyptic Wishlist, was a success in terms of education and creative growth. But in our attempts to finish an album, we sometimes snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. What was most challenging was not producing music we loved so much as maintaining the high quality we aspired to throughout a 4+ minute song. I was dj’ing a little in Nola and was interested in whether we could make snippets of iterations of our songs in progress flow as a continuous mix, and learn about each other from selecting our favorite moments of multiple iterations of songs in progress. The initial version of this 2015 mixtape collected and sequenced many of the snippets we loved and helped us communicate and grow our taste and aesthetic toward each other. In the process, we recaptured the simple joy of creating together and haven’t looked back since. Imagine a giant record with the needle skipping across the demos of greatest hits of a band that only exists in your imagination. The music collected here reflects the range of our vision for SWB, and we look forward to sharing a fully realized version of this vision with some new twists in our upcoming album, Aleutian Megathrust. Thanks for listening, please stay safe, and remember we are all in this together.