(May 2018 "From the Archive") - "An Electronic Tribute To Sean"

This year marks the ten year anniversary of our first album, General Winter's Secret Museum, which was released on July 1st, 2008!

In honor of this momentous occasion, we will be posting unreleased material specifically from this era of the band's history. This will culminate with us posting the unreleased and oft-asked about nearly 10 minute title track, "General Winter"!

The first thing that we're sharing with you all is a demo that we did back in 2006 at Big Blue Meenie Studios for General Winter's Secret Museum. Of the 21 songs that we recorded for these demos, 11 songs were chosen to be properly recorded for the album. Three of those songs were fully recorded but kept off the album due to time constraints.

"Zero Wave" (which we've already made available here on Patreon)...

"General Winter", the title track, and the album's 10 minute epic (which we will be posting here on Patreon in July)...

...and this song, "An Electronic Tribute To Sean".

Our producer Tim Gilles was very fond of this one. He felt that it had a nostalgia and a sweetness to it.

However, in what has come to be known as "The Tea Club Curse", when it came time to mix the song, the recordings vanished.

That's right. Just gone.

Tim and the studio mutts at Big Blue scrambled around for days, trying to figure out where the hell these tracks had gone. Alas, the consensus was that the recordings had taken a tip from John Cleese and managed to  "disappear completely and never be found".

The recordings were never recovered, and we had no choice but to leave the song off the album. All that remains is this demo version. It's raw, there's guitar buzzing in the recording, and it was the first and only take. But here it is, in all of it's "lost demo" glory!

This song dates all the way back to 2002. When me and Pat first started writing songs together, I would usually play the bass, the keyboard, or sing. But this song was my first attempt at writing a guitar part with my brother. The two of us playing the guitar would later become the core of our songwriting partnership.

P.S. The bizarre song title is an inside joke about all of the "electronic tribute to (insert famous band)" albums that were popular at the time. Sean was a hilarious and jolly friend of ours, and we felt we needed to honor him with a song title!

This recording of “An Electronic Tribute To Sean” was performed by:

Patrick McGowan - Guitar

Dan McGowan - Guitar