The House on Laurel Street Pt. 2
One quick thing: Preorders for New Love Stories are now open. You can reserve your copy now at Bandcamp.
“The House on Laurel Street” first appeared in draft form all the way back in 1996. (If you missed the last post about the back story, read this.)
Around that time, I’d started to realize that the songwriting I most admired usually sidled right up next to mawkishness before turning away at the last possible moment. When it came to lyrics, I decided, my fear of embarrassment was going to be my skin in the game. My early version of the song (then called “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You Now?”) was an attempt at trying to be emotionally direct, even at the risk of sounding like a poseur or a fool.
Here’s a sample of that version, recorded on my four-track cassette recorder in ‘96. I share this fragment with more than a little chagrin — I do not think this was a success! Today I can hear the song it would later become, but at the time I was just fumbling in the dark.
A couple of decades later I took another stab at the song, with a very different feel. By the time I was working on this, I’d decided I basically liked the song — just not the arrangements I’d tried earlier. I experimented a lot, mostly without success. Here’s where things stood in a demo I recorded on my own in 2018:
In late 2021, the current version of the band recorded its take on “Laurel Street” in our sessions for our debut record. This was getting very close. There’s some fine playing on it — I especially love the rhythm section parts. But for a variety of reasons this version of “House” didn’t quite fit the album we made. It’s never been released.
Over the next 18 months we refined the arrangement a bit, bumped up the tempo even more, and finally found the full song as it appears on New Love Stories. Almost three decades after that first draft, it is ready for its official debut. Some things take time.