SHAKE THE SHEETS DEMOS 2003-2004
(full artwork included with full album download)

I almost didn’t put these up, but my old friend and long-time booking agent, Mahmood Shaikh, assured me they were of interest, so here they are, for this twentieth anniversary of the Shake The Sheets album: the demos. I think the main reason I was hesitant was that I wasn’t sure they revealed much - it’s a little bit like, the songs are there, just… not as good? Ha. But as I think about it a little more now, there are some things that they reveal to me.
For one, the songs were already there, pretty tight, and in almost zero cases underwent any significant changes in the final iterations, because that’s the kind of band we were at that point. I understand that twenty years have gone by, and thus you can’t assume that everyone around now was as around then (for a myriad of reasons, obviously) but from the time Chris started playing with me in 2001, we basically stayed on the road until we lost Lookout! Records from under us in 2005/2006. We played everywhere, all the time, multiple times, every year, and our tightness as a band unit reflected that. This, in turn, led to me starting to write less in long periods of ennui and experimentation, and more just “toward” the band as it was. This wasn’t just happenstance, but a conscious decision to embrace happenstance and meet the moment, and I think that’s also reflected in the demos of the first half of the album, which are all just me. I can often go off into a Ringo/McCartney drum fantasy when I’m in a more stretched-out “songwriter”-y phase, but I think you can probably tell that on all of the songs I drum on here, I’m literally just trying my best to do Chris. Which is funny… to me, at least. Maybe to Chris, too. I’ll ask him.
The other thing to remember, is that amid all the touring, along with it, adjacent to it, etc.; we’d been furiously against and doing what we could to protest the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Stinging from 9/11, stinging from the direction the country took after 9/11, and within our lanes, such as we saw them, hammering and hammering about it. This album, to me, in contrast to how it was often received, has always felt tired and sad, but I was trying to do some calling in, some community gathering, some pausing to consider before getting back out there if we could; and the positive reenergizing aspects of these songs come through more for me in these demos, listening to them now, than I think they ever have up to this day. Hope they may have helped, hope they still could.

1. ME AND MIA - IYKYK, but also, listening back to this, I forgot how croon-y I was trying to be at first, and how cringe-y it makes me feel right now. You know, I think I had often let the energy behind my voice tip it over into yelping, and I just didn’t want to do that anymore. Like, if I was gonna scream, I was fine with screaming, but if I was gonna sing, I kind of just wanted to sing. So I was working on it. I would like to give it up to the great Chris Shaw, who produced this record, for helping me ultimately find what I think was the right balance, on the album, itself.

2. THE ANGELS’ SHARE - an Irish inspired vocal over a ska-influenced and (in my mind) Clash-like disco-punk rhythm. If you are reading that as an equation, and seeing the hazy form of me appearing in the [x] after the equal sign, you get it. I’ve long had this idea about creative art being like alchemy - liberating the divine spark in base metals and transforming them into gold (this will come up again later). It’s also a metaphor for the distillation process, in which one ferments simple (or complex, I guess) grains and winds up with “spirits,” but there’s a fee to pay in that one - the evaporation that takes place during the aging process is gifted back to the heavens, and is called “the angels’ share.” And it’s required that you give it back.

3. THE ONE WHO GOT US OUT - What can be said. Imagining a person. Incidentally, you know, we did a lot of benefits and drives for personal and political causes, but this was right around the time I remember someone saying to me, “Well, as a Democrat, you must…” and me interrupting them to say, “I’m not a Democrat,” and them being absolutely apoplectic that I was affirmatively stating that I wasn’t a Democrat. I believe in thinking about broad coalitions and what voting means for them, and you don’t have to put a ton of brain work into guessing my entire voting history, but it doesn’t mean I have to join their party*, or that I can’t criticize them when they are, for example, complicit in DRIVING the war machine. (*I did, in fact, eventually register with them so I could vote in certain primaries. So… fine.)

4. COUNTING DOWN THE HOURS - I won’t say a ton about this. It’s impressionistic and personal, but also an attempt to cast myself outward with empathy. Thoughts driving from NJ to RI and back one day and night, as we slid further into war.

5. LITTLE DAWN - Musically, this was a mash-up of two separate ideas I couldn’t make work on their own. Not a metaphor - you can kind of hear the edits, if you listen closely. Still not sure I should’ve attempted the Brenton Wood-esque soul backing vocals, but I’m also still into it, so whatever. Lyrically, vocally, this was for somebody specific, and for you, and for myself. I suppose it’s one of the two poles of the album; and I wanted to hold somebody’s head and repeat this, and I wanted to hold anybody’s head and repeat this, and I wanted somebody to hold my head and repeat this.

6. HEART PROBLEMS - One of the most basic things any society should do is care for the health and well being of every single member of that society. The money is there. The brains of this capitalist world are not. I’ve been through it, so many people I know have been through it, perhaps you’ve been through it, too. Humanity can transcend our animal instincts to make choices, and you can’t apply the law of the jungle to a world full of cities.

7. CRIMINAL PIECE - Eh, just thinking about aging as an activist. Wondering how you pivot when different concerns enter your life. Hoping that you don’t get too settled, living in Sausalito. It’s interesting that I guess I must have even written these in some semblance of the order they appear on the album, because here, and on through the end, the demos are now the band from that era, and I think the rest of these may have even all been recorded at one practice. I could be wrong about that, but they definitely post-date all the previous ones I worked on alone.

8. BETTER DEAD THAN LEAD - Considering media narratives, propaganda, and the general milieu of the stories we live in. Going back to that alchemy metaphor and, here, also applying it as a critical thinking tool and a way to look at the world. The dream is the gold - goodness and care and love (and the need to believe in it); the lead is what blocks it. None of it is as real as us.

9. SHAKE THE SHEETS - The other pole of the album; this one definitely written to myself. I’ve said this a million times, so forgive me for saying it again, but so much of my approach during these years became less about singing in some vague hope of affecting the people making war, and much more about affecting the people living through war, including, as I say, myself. I remember someone once telling me that the first person narrative of the song, “Loyal To My Sorrowful Country” (released between Hearts of Oak and Shake the Sheets) was pretentious. I’m pretentious enough to reject that notion out of hand, but the truth is, when I write in first-person narrative, I do it not thinking that I’m somehow special or unique. In fact, I do it with the explicit feeling that I’m NOT unique, and that anything I’m thinking and feeling is also probably being thought and felt by many more people than will ever hear my records. Like, at the risk of sounding *actually* pretentious, every “I” usually has some conscious other sense of “we” about it, to me. I don’t think I’m ever really trying to teach a lesson so much as channel our stories, distill some points from them (that word, again), and have them resonate. Another thing that comes up in a number of songs of mine, especially from this era, is this, “tending your garden” thing. “The world ain’t ready” just means, don’t let THAT be the thing that breaks you - there’s a relationship right here you can start with, and then, you know, WE go from there. There’s one lyric change here that I want to address. Instead of “take it to,” as it is on the album, I first said “brutalize.” I was thinking about using their own tactics, especially in light of what was happening in the various military prisons we were running around the world. But I will tell you, it was jarring for ME to hear myself say that, and it didn’t feel good. I mean, it felt BAD. And it feels bad now. And I’m sorry you’re hearing it, and I’m glad I changed it.

10. BLEEDING POWERS and 11. WALKING TO DO - I guess having said all that about Shake The Sheets (the song), these wind up being addendum and epilogue? A bit of daybreak after the heavy night, a bit of recommitment and engagement; on an individual level in Bleeding Powers and a communal level in Walking to Do. These are also songs of recognition, respect, and love for a person/the people who we see working through all of the above, and working in, on, and with the world. Each is kind of a bow TO someone else, and a pledge to keep walking with them.
And it’s true.

-TL
May Day, 2024