DEMO

Hello, friends. I am sure by now you are tired of hearing from people who ‘hope you are hanging in there’ at this moment. Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about the big bad thing. Plenty of other, smarter people seem to have that covered for now. There will be plenty of time for that sort of thing in the future—for now, I’m going to keep my head up, keep making art and keep trying to spread peace and comfort to those who cross my path.

With that in mind, I decided to pop a wheelie on Patreon this month and share a whole album’s worth of previously unreleased music. The catch: they’re all demos. Crazy? Perhaps. I may end up regretting this, but listening through this morning I found them to be wholly charming as one big, rough, sloppy piece, so I sequenced them into a record. This “record” is ten tracks long, and it’s called “DEMO.” I wrote a little more about the process below, and the record itself is available for my paying Patreon subscribers (for whom I remain extremely grateful!)

Additionally, our final Undertow-Living-Room-Duo-Casual Prius-Tour (for a while, at least) is now underway! So far we have played shows in Durham, Raleigh, Greensboro and Chapel Hill (thanks so much to all who came!) As of this moment, limited tickets are still available for:

Charlotte, NC

Knoxville, TN

Huntsville, AL

Opelika, AL

Jacksonville, FL

Savannah, GA

Charleston, SC

If you know anyone in any of these places, please send them our way. If the price of admission is too much of a hurdle for anyone, DM me on Patreon or Instagram. I will accommodate as many people who want to be there as I can.

For what it’s worth, I’m finding it deeply grounding to be out in the world, doing something productive that I love with other people. Take whatever time you need, but remember that the best and most beautiful parts of being alive are still out there, waiting for you.

JW

“DEMO”

I found all of these songs by searching for the word “demo” on my various hard drives.

Some of them (like track one, dive, which I’ve been trying to place for years) I remember quite well. Some of them (such as track 2, flo) I don’t remember writing at all, which is truly wild to consider. Imagine hearing a completely new song for the first time, except it’s your voice singing it—a surreal experience, to be sure. (And I didn’t even need to use AI—just my own fallible human brain!)

Here’s the thing: they do not sound “good”. Like—at all. When you’re trying to capture an idea, you have to work fast, so I try not to slow myself down—I choose quick, easy, boilerplate sounds, presets that I’ll typically replace later. It’s a sketch—the point is to capture the broad strokes of the thing as quickly as possible, before you lose the thread.

There’s an unintended side effect of this method, which I realized while listening through to all of these today—they all sort of hang together, sonically. I’m reminded of my hero, Arthur Russell, the majority of whose music was released only posthumously because he considered it unfinished. This is not to say that I believe these songs are even remotely close to his level of brilliance. But many of my favorite songs of his are beloved precisely because they are so unpolished. They feel more human, more accessible, more real. Of course, it’s always easier to enjoy someone else’s imperfections, while experiencing your own only as failures, errors and mistakes. I’ve been trying to call myself out on that tendency for my entire career—so, I figure, why not call my own bluff? Because I might be embarrassed to have these things out in the world? Who cares. Perhaps these might even help someone else judge themselves less harshly. All artists, even great artists make a lot of total shit. It’s part of it.

Not to say that I think these are bad, exactly—if I thought they were fully un-redeemable I wouldn’t release them. But you have to write your way through a lot of songs to get to the really good ones. Usually I can tell fairly quickly if a song is the most distilled version of an idea, or whether it’s just a stop along the way, and these are almost certainly the latter. But just because these songs will never make it onto a “real” record doesn’t mean they aren’t interesting or useful—or, hopefully, even meaningful to you?

So, there you have it: an entire sequenced record’s worth of fuzzy, undercooked, unmixed demos. Have at it, folks.