To the Forgotten Songs
At current count, I have written 92 songs. Of those, 76 have been recorded. Of the remaining 16, they break down as follows:
• 4 poised for future recording
• 3 are old and unrecorded (and probably won’t be)
• 9 are lost to the cosmos
I don’t know what makes certain songs drift off while others cling to life. The nine lost songs are not my nine worst songs, so there exists no satisfying explanation that suggests the songs that fall away are simply the most terrible ones. Of course, they aren’t my nine best songs, either. Save for a trio of very early songs in this group, the remaining six misfits are mostly situated in the upper-lower class of my songbook, their curse being in a category that most consumers (and creators) might classify as “forgettable.”
Another trio are fairly easy to identify as to why they rode off into the sunset: They were written in early-to-mid 2011 just before I started playing with the folk band Something with Trees. These songs —titled “This Town,” “A Vanishing Tale,” and “Talking with Portraits”— found some life in the live setting for a few months, but ultimately got usurped by the songs I started writing for the band. For those intimately initiated in the Brian Davis musical annals, this included songs like “The Main Event,” “Devils in the Halls,” “Follow the Sky,” and “Carry On”: songs that were immediately offered to the band and became part of the backbone of our sets.
Listening to those now more than a decade later, I’m reminded of a few things. One, my friend, Shaina, really has an awesome ear for harmony; second, Collin, our mandolin player, really was something (he was only 15 back then). Third, and in line with many of my old recordings, my singing pitch is so high. Lastly, I should play harmonica more often; it’s not the most versatile instrument, but it has the capacity to really add a nice layer, as it does in “Main Event.”
Most of the Something with Trees songs fossilized with the dissolution of the band —the exception being “Devils in the Halls,” which often served as my “I-can-be-louder-than-you” song for shows when obnoxious people insisted on talking right in front of the stage.
Why a song like “Talking with Portraits” —a song I remember being reasonably proud of— didn’t move into band life, I don’t know. It was quieter and introspective, but we had several songs in that spirit, so it wouldn’t have been an outlier. The only lyric I remember is what I think was the chorus. I don’t think this is verbatim correct, but you get the gist:
Talking with the portraits is a necessary task
The questions beg the answers long after you’ve asked
You won’t have that judgmental point of view
Just another picture staring back at you
“The Main Event” was the first song I wrote lyrics for without any sense of the melody. Sitting in the dim lighting of the Red Barn in Peoria, having already performed my weekly open mic offerings, I opened my little journal and started writing. I think I liked that image: the songwriter scribbling away in the darkness and din of an unremarkable bar, scratching out lines and mucking up a page like it was a laboratory full of oozing, exploding experiments. I’ll take “Taking Yourself Too Seriously” for $600, Alex.
Once completed, it was the first song destined for my third solo release —a release that was abandoned due to the band’s forming, and a likely home for the lost songs mentioned above. I wonder what “The Main Event” might have sounded like if it wasn’t elevated by my bandmates, if it had been offered to this theoretical third album of mine that never was. If instead of sitting alongside the folk and bluegrass trappings of Something with Trees, it sat alongside “Talking with Portraits,” “This Town,” and “A Vanishing Tale.” There’s no way that album ends up as much of a turning point as Something with Trees was. A road not taken, so to speak.
The musical escapades above were before the birth of A Metropolitan Guide, which was started in the wake of Something with Trees’ dissolution. All of these songs sit in the unceremonious “Early Work” folder on my drives. Some of these deserve better than that, but there is no doubt the presence of a dividing line post-band. Perhaps the biggest reason for this isn’t the obvious “going solo” moment, but rather given how much we played live as a band, there is actually about a year and a half of musical growth between the Something with Trees songs and the first songs that appeared on Lesser Tragedies in 2013 at the dawn of A Metropolitan Guide. There was a brief moment when “Call the Rain Down” was destined for Something with Trees’ second album. How different that song would have sounded, too.
The other lost songs are a bit more scattered, and a few died out because of how early they were, never being granted the moment when recording access, willingness, and readiness converged. But two songs —"Crazy Margaret” and “Mysterious Stranger”— were late enough to be considered for A Metropolitan Guide, appearing after Lesser Tragedies, and were definitely recordable, and are the only two songs of the Metropolitan Guide era to have been finished but not recorded. Losing them was kind of like “Talking with Portraits” —probably not songs that would have changed my musical trajectory, but maybe better to have had than not.