Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.
This deep rabbit hole First Draft concerns the unfinished version of Beck’s 2005 apocalyptically poppy record Guero, which leaked out onto the Internet in early January that year and has been floating around ever since.
Been a while since I’ve done a First Draft! Truth be told, aside from floating away from the premise, I ran out of albums within reach that truly fit the original formula: a released album that underwent major changes from an earlier form that later gets released on its own. There’s still plenty of albums with weird, twisted upbringings to tell of–I just have to be a little more flexible with the mission statement. Let’s do that and discuss some albums.
This First Draft concerns a leak. Leaks are nothing new or old in the music world, but in the same way the album itself was recorded at a point where technology was advancing fast enough to make the technical ambitions of the person who made it a reality and for those technical ambitions to become obsolete in the following decade, the leaks happened at a time when music was dead easy to share, but wouldn’t be listened to nearly the same way ten years after. Better still–the leak concerns an album without a release date when it happened, and some of its songs are missing anything from final touches to an entire editing pass. Let’s dig in.
Fax machine anthems, get your damn hands up
Beck is the perfect example of an artist people find “weird”, but you can tell it all makes perfect sense to him. A multi-instrumentalist who can breach and bridge basically any genre, who can write sharp singles and airtight conceptual records each, nothing is off-limits and nothing is a put-on for Beck Hansen. He’s a guy who went from doing self-released anti-folk cassettes in the early 90s to placing twice on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.
Even if he’s less prolific and not quite the cutting edge he once was (which I never cared about, and I’ll go back to that later), he’s content these days to oscillate between slick, fun ironic pop and introspective acoustic music depending on the album. The latest of the latter, Ride Lonesome, drops in just over a week as of writing. (I gotta catch up, my Beck knowledge admittedly ends in 2008.)
Something always missing, always someone missing something
After spending the mid-to-late 90s establishing the musical confines he’d mine throughout his career, the ragged, reverent folk of One Foot in the Grave, the Dust Brothers pop kaleidoscope Odelay, the somnambulant acoustic rock of Mutations, or the neon No-Doz venereal freak-funk of Midnite Vultures, the 2000s brought Beck to a slower roll. 2002’s Sea Change was wounded heart, technicolor sadness, a rumination on getting cheated on by his longtime girlfriend and growing from the experience, and everyone fell in love with it pretty much immediately. Good thing; no immediate follow-up emerged.
Producing a mid-career gem like that only gets people wondering where you go next, and Beck isn’t so straightforward. 2003 and 2004 went with word that his next record would actually be a return to Odelay, the dense patchwork of bizarre samples, Spanglish delirium, aggro rapping, fuzz bass, twang, somber comedowns, and jubilant dysfunction that cemented Beck as one of the most forward-thinking artists to come out of 90s alt-pop. This was bolstered by the return of Odelay producers the Dust Brothers, plus word of collaboration with everyone from Jack White to Dan the Automator to Boards of Canada.
Only problem–the 2004 release date would not be made. Delays imply that a record is pretty far out still in the pipeline, but truth be told, I don’t think Guero was. I was able to find screener copies of the album, the running order final though the album itself was still unnamed, dated for December 2004 and early looks at the material from journos as early as September 2004. This is where it’d be really good to have that advance Guero CD so we could directly compare it to the leaked album and see which was further along, but we don’t, unfortunately. Doubly confusing–because Guero had such a maximalist rollout between b-sides and remixes on multiple formats, some of the early song titles and information from journalists refer to songs that wouldn’t make the final album, or to remixes that were happening before the final album had even dropped.
All this suggests that the recording process for Guero was as scattershot as the release. Perhaps the delays were less with the final album and more for getting everything around it in order. Nevertheless, 2004 came and went with no Guero. Beck fans looked to 2005 for it instead.
And it came a lot sooner than anyone expected.
Finding details on the Guero leak is tricky. The Internet really isn’t as forever as people would have you believe, and although the Web was firmly entrenched in the mainstream by this point, it wasn’t like today where artists have entire subreddits at the ready waiting to immortalize the next morsel they get out from an upcoming release.
Anyway, I’ve always thought the real magic is in the details–hence this series–so let’s try to pin down specific dates in the timeline and get primary sources for when and what exactly happened.
Salon writes Friday, January 21, 2005:
Those online during the wee hours of the sleepy Sunday evening before Martin Luther King Day received an unexpected treat when word spread that mysterious (and now disappeared) Nappy Cat Blog had abruptly leaked a complete disc’s worth of tracks from the long rumored, still untitled Beck album (now named “Guero” — slang for “fair-haired white boy” — and slated for a March 29 release).
Billboard writes the same day:
Beck’s new studio album, “Guero,” will be released as planned on March 29 via Geffen, despite an unmixed version of the set hitting the Internet last weekend.
Martin Luther King Day is observed the third Monday of every January in the US, which fell on the 17th in 2005. NME reported on the leak as early as the 18th and said Interscope were looking to bump the release date up as a result, though gave no specific date (only between March 21 and 28). The Irish Examiner wrote about the leak and release date bump on the 19th, though again with no specific date. MTV also wrote about it on the 19th and gave March 29 as the release date. (March 29 would indeed see the release of Guero.) Either way, it’s safe to say we’re looking at Sunday the 16th for the official day the leaks appeared online.
I was immensely curious about this “Nappy Cat Blog”–of the visible sources on Google, only Salon named the leaker, even making mention of how mysterious and quickly gone the blog was, and the name sounded generic enough to throw off immediate suspicion. I thought Salon had either made it up or this blog truly was a flash in the pan courtesy of some insider ninja, but then I found something, deep in the pages of Google and saved by the wonderful Beck.com mirror-fansite hybrid Diskobox that’s uncovered exactly the way the leak moved about.
Re: the leak: There were a bunch of tracks online but they probably aren’t there anymore. The leak seemed to start from the nappy cat and then some tracks were made available at one louder and aeki tuesday. As armcicles.com says, “wait for the friggin’ album to come out” (at one point armcircles had the whole album, then a few tracks, and now…well, you can wait).
Leaker #1: The Nappy Cat Chronicles
The Wayback Machine’s first grabs for thenappycat.com indeed come from early 2005. While it was nuked by February, only returning a blank Apache index, the last modified date of January 19, 2005 suggests it was up the 16th and gone by the 19th. As such, the original page for the leak is sadly lost to time, as the Wayback Machine only took notice the following day.
Grabs from a few months later refer to it as the Nappy Cat Chronicles, a vBadvanced (a fork of vBulletin, which was forum software) forum with a music news area copyrighted to a William Zeallor, who describes himself as such in an even later grab of the site:
Once upon a time, Will wanted to be a full-time student for life. Then, one day, a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology magically appeared on his wall and he wasn’t allowed to sign up for classes. Since then, Will has begun drinking fancy coffee, has been fired by the FBI, and has purchased a new pair of shoes. He currently writes behavior plans for special needs individuals as a psychology associate for The Chimes. In his spare time, Will practices chord shifts on his guitar and does design work on his website. He stays current by reading blogs and by being an all around nerd.
From all my browsing of these Nappy Cat Chronicles grabs, it seems to be a scattershot political opinion/music nerd/everyday happenings blog shared between two friends or perhaps roommates, William Zeallor and David Skibicki, who’s not really relevant to the story but whose name was showing up on the site as early as the April 2005 grabs. (A third, even less relevant guy, Mike Katsimbris, would get added even later and seemed to post exclusively politics, and quite nastily modern political discourse at that.)
I have no doubt these later grabs are from the same Nappy Cat. For one thing, there’s mention in the footer of MP3s for download not being of concern to the RIAA and requiring special handling to honor removal requests–the kind of thing you’d add to your site after you just got your ass rammed by Interscope for leaking a Beck record. The “notorious since 2005” in the header of the earlier grabs is also fittingly cheeky.
Though it’s not archived, Aeki Tuesday (who I’ll get to in a moment) linked to the original Nappy Cat Chronicles leak post at http://www.thenappycat.com/reviews/archives/2005/01/beck_not_yet_ti.php. That’s not the URL structure of the later grabs, which tells me this site popped up as a blog in early 2005, was quickly nuked from orbit, and relaunched in the spring of 2005, going on to be a place for two (and later three) college grad dudes to post about whatever they wanted to, including music reviews, until it sleepwalked into WordPress oblivion in the late 2010s. The domain has since lapsed.
Now, where did they get Guero? That’s the interesting bit, and anyone’s guess. This blog might’ve posted the MP3s to the world, but we’re talking about random psych grads and art students from the East Coast, not label employees, not studio raccoons, and no one who lives anywhere near Los Angeles. Having the original Nappy Cat leak post would also be seriously useful, but we don’t, unfortunately. I have theories, but I’ll save them for later.
Leaker #2: One Louder
One Louder was a NYC music and MP3 blog that popped up in mid-2004 and was gone by 2006. Unceremoniously, it was scooped up by spammers to hock ringtones until Google shut the shitshow down, the name locked down to new blogs forevermore. Most of its grabs surround the dates of the leaks, though again the leak post itself wasn’t grabbed. The blog did have this to say about Guero later on, when Guero‘s oddball release was unveiled:
Hey Guero, Buy Three Version of the New Beck CD!
I didn’t mean to hurt Beck‘s feelings when I posted a couple of MP3s from the bootleg of his new album, Guero a few weeks ago. But it looks like Beck‘s pain will be our gain. Billboard reports that Mr. Hansen will release three versions of his new album on March 29: a standard CD, a double disc with videos and 5.1 audio, and an extra special version with four remixes. Take that, pesky bootleg pirates!
He’s brought Boards of Canada, Octet, Dizzee Rascal and Royksopp on board for the mixes. The videos on the double disc will be for “E-Pro” and “Black Tambourine.”
I know that the general opinion of the new material was rather negative, but I liked what I heard and will be purchasing Guero when it comes out. Sorry, you will not find any MP3s of it here for download.
Leaker #3: Aeki Tuesday
Aeki Tuesday was a personal blog-turned music news blog of one Jenny François. It too has been long vacant and used for spam, but there’s actually decent references to this one on Google, some of album reviews, some of live photos, and of course, one of the Guero leak, so she seemed to be connected and in the know. She writes this, though with her yousendit.com links stripped out:
New Beck Album (Leaked!)
The long delayed Beck album is leaked*. The original release date was October 25, 2004 but it was pushed back to February of this year. The Nappy Cat has all the tracks available and provides an early review of the album.
Beck recently did an interview for SMH where he talked about the upcoming album, his new baby (Cosmo) and rapping again.“I didn’t ever think that I was going to rap again,” he says with a smile. “I thought those days were over. But I got a lot of encouragement from the Dust Brothers to do that again. I just didn’t figure there was a place for it anymore for me. There are so many more people doing it better and bigger . . . I don’t know.” – Beck
*The company we work for needs to invest in a computer that has a sound card. Tell us how it sounds like.
UPDATE: We were able to get a few tracks. Check out One Louder (taken down) for 2 tracks for download. Here are some new & rare Beck mp3s.
Download (new): Black Tambourine.mp3 | Summer Girl.mp3 | Got It Alone.mp3
Download (Rare tracks): Ship In A Bottle (Sea Change Outtake).wma | MTV Makes Me Want To Smoke Crack (lounge).wma | Asskizz Powergrudge (Payback ’94).wma
Leaker #4: Armcircles
This is the weirdest one of the lot. The earliest grabs of armcircles.com were of a Web design company, but this morphed (though definitely from the same people, as a Ryan Peters is listed as contact info for both versions of the site) into an MP3 download site and seemingly a place to chronicle a couple friends dicking around. By the time of the Guero leaks, there was only this slightly ghastly abstract 3D render and nothing else on their front page.
Two variants of the leak page exist. Diskobox mentions these guys once had the full album, and that page didn’t get grabbed, but the later one of only a couple songs did. “Chris”, with MP3s for “Qué Onda Guero”, “E-Pro”, and “Girl” in tow, has this to say:
so, i leaked the beck ‘guero’ demos or whatever the other day. i stress DEMOS, since mr. hansen’s publicist has said recently that the mp3s leaked onto the internet uncermoniously (apparently they missed the hot air balloons) were unmastered demos. while they could be demos, they sound slightly mastered… oh well. we win some, we lose some.
there were some sixteen thousand requests for what i had on this site yesterday (thursday), and three thousand the day before that. i have no idea what the figures are now, but i’m sure that the numbers are way down since i took the site down in the afternoon. i hope so at least.
anyway, i’m updating this again now (nine-thirty eastern time friday night) to put a few songs back online. these songs do appear on the album and this does include the first single (at least the one announced on fmqb.com as going for adds next month on modern rock radio). anyway, please don’t sue me, beck. your fans love and respect you and i don’t see that changing with the release of your new record, whatever it actually sounds like.
ahem.
don’t download illegal music off of the internet. and wait for the friggin’ album to come out. fyi. thx.
According to fansites, Beck was not pleased about the leak, but I wanted to get a direct quote to round out the history lesson. It was digging for this quote that led me to all of the above history. It’s a chain reaction indeed. (We’ll come back to this quote later.)
Speaking of, as some of you may have seen, the new Beck album, tentatively due out March 28th, has unceremoniously been leaked onto the masses. This is NOT the final album. It is an early unmixed, unmastered version that is neither the final sequence or all the tracks that will appear, so please be aware this is not what Beck intended to happen or bestow onto his fans.
The Final Product: Revisiting Guero
I’ve written about Guero in the past, and listening to it again last night, my thoughts are still pretty broadly positive on it. The general issue people seem to have with it is that it’s tamed, it isn’t a speeding bullet into the future like Beck’s previous work. Odelay was a patchwork of sounds that were deeply uncool and out of time turned into something exciting and unmistakably 1996. Guero fit in nicely with the wave of 2005 indie, a crafted, tidy whole work with impressionist lyrical shards and scuzzy, earthy sonic textures.
I don’t know if I really would have wanted Beck to make another Odelay, really. I think if he shot for that, it wouldn’t have sounded natural. Beck was 26 when Odelay came out and 35 come Guero. 26 is still prime experimenting age, when you’re trying to find your legs creatively (and Beck certainly was given it was the follow-up to “Loser”). 35 is well into settling down age–most people have spouses and kids and a career by that point. What would a 35-year-old trying to do something that spunky have looked like? I think it would’ve been pretty tryhard, where Guero sounds completely natural, a conscious return to old sounds with a new mindset.
When you’re a zingy, “weird” creative, people are forever going to hunger for your early period when the canvas is blank and balk after you’ve filled it in. I find it annoying and the notion overrated. Beck’s range coming into Guero was already impressive–even in the realm of acoustic folk rock stuff, he’d produced three albums that all sounded completely different, let alone two very different oddball party pop records and the demonic K-Tel compilation Mellow Gold. (And let’s not even talk about Stereopathetic.) What exactly what he supposed to do? Zydeco? No, he made a Beck album. And it’s a really damn good Beck album.
It’s easy to connect the various sounds of Guero–the blaring guitars, the lifted drum loops, the twangy acoustics and harmonicas, the rapping–to Beck’s past, but it all coalesces into this rich world of thematic decay, Odelay by way of Mutations if you will. “Girl” is a Beck song you can play for your grandparents, provided they’re not listening to the words about burning rags and nooses hanging off the sun. “Hell Yes” sounds like an early Information track, shiny, DJ-scratched hip-hop beats matched with paranoid lyrics about everything from thought control to whatever the skeleton boys in the disco are hyped up on.
I like it the best when the mood gets brought really low. “Missing” is all stately Brazilian orchestras, but rhythmically, it shambles, each of its verses exploring having some gigantic hole in your life you can’t quite seem to fill. “Broken Drum” was initally called “Outerspace”, which suits with its guitar rockets that zoom across the plinky space age rhythm section, and it’s an especially hushed farewell that I’ve always thought resonates because of the chilly spaces between the notes, rather than the notes themselves. “Scarecrow” is a muddy, swampy four-on-the-floor ode to uselessness. “Earthquake Weather” is as burned out and sun-bleached as L.A. would be in the apocalypse.
Where Beck did experiment for Guero was in the release. As quoted above, Guero (and subsequently The Information) came out over a bunch of formats and configurations, with Beck’s ambitions being that the listener has just as much control over the final result as the artist. Beck saw the potential for the CD, the DVD, the UMD, and the Web to all provide completely different listening experiences for the same album, and for each song to be the skeleton for a hundred different versions. We ultimately know this isn’t how music wound up being listened to–though if more artists released their stuff as stems, that’d be baller–but Beck was thinking simpler with the framework so that everything hung on it could be the experiment, and that’s something that also gets missed from the “Guero is dull” conversation.
I think it’s a terrific album, and probably my go-to casual Beck listening album. The Mutations comparison is especially apt for me, since that’s my favorite Beck album of them all. The man’s work is deceptively precise given his range–exactly why I have never cared that he’s not throwing everything including the kitchen sink in there.
The First Draft: Examining Ubiquitous
(Despite that Ubiquitous is more than likely a fan name, it’s a useful name to distinguish the leaked version of Guero, which has different songs and some differing mixes, to Guero itself. It’s Ubiquitous in my music library, and I shall be referring to it occasionally as such here.)
As I said in the intro, part of the reason I’ve been so rigid about these First Draft topics was because I like canonicity. When an artist finishes a work and puts it out, and then puts out an alternate take on it, you can directly compare those because they’re what the artist has called two separate drafts–but you can’t directly compare Guero and Ubiquitous, as the latter doesn’t have an exact form. It’s not a finished album, and it’s not even a singular running order depending on who you ask.
I’ve seen versions of the leak that call tracks different names, change the ordering, seem to contain different songs altogether, and one comment on Reddit even remembered the leak as containing early Information tracks, which I’ve never seen, personally. Stereogum reported that “Broken Drum” was part of the leak (along with a hugely mysterious track called “Stone Junkie” that even Whiskeyclone wasn’t sure about in my light emailing with them, though another source calls it a “Mellow Gold rehash” and my only guess is it’s “Farewell Ride”), and I’ve never seen that either–but it could have been, because promo copies with “Broken Drum” were already in circulation among the press. It could’ve replaced “Send a Message to Her” on some copy they got. Who’s to say?
All that said, I’ve compared my own copy of the leak to ones I’ve gotten off Reddit and SoulSeek and compared running orders between fansites, and here’s what I’d call the “canon” version of Ubiquitous, the most commonly agreed on leaked running order you’ll find, with common mislabels or known early titles listed after each song:
- Missing [“Brazilica”]
- Qué Onda Guero [“Guero”]
- Go It Alone
- Chain Reaction
- Emergency Exit [“Nazarene”, “Gospel”]
- Black Tambourine
- Earthquake Weather [some copies of the leak amusingly affix “(maybe)” to the end of the file name]
- E-Pro
- Girl [“Summer Girl”]
- Scarecrow
- Rental Car [“Track 11”]
- Send a Message to Her [“Track 12”, “Dance”]
- Hell Yes [“Hell Yeah”]
Beck’s camp has alternatingly called these “demos” and “unmixed and unmastered”. The latter is partially true–in mastering, the spaces between songs and overall volume get hashed out, and these are often missing their crossfades and sometimes any fades at all, some intros and outros go on for longer, and the dynamic range of the leaked songs is higher than the album version, though not by a ton generally. Demos is not true, though. These are generally very close to their final versions, with few differences in performances and only minor tweaks to certain sections of the songs to go.
You might find that anti-climactic, but there are still some interesting differences to discuss. “Qué Onda Guero” has some differences in its bridge and stew of samples, though the biggest difference is the Ubiquitous version retains the reference to the El Salvadorian gang MS-13 right before the second chorus, while the stereo album mix partially blanks and covers it with sound effects (the surround mix also keeps the reference intact). I’m guessing Beck didn’t want to be seen as supporting the gang, though its place in the song is merely to set the scene of Los Angeles, where MS-13 are from, so it only makes sense.
“Scarecrow” is the most wildly different track of them all, being nearly twice the length of the final album version. “Scarecrow” is a very jammy song, riding the same stomping slide guitar groove the entire time, so this extra space for vocalizations and harmonicas only really benefits the atmosphere. By comparison, the album version plays like a radio edit, still a really cool song, but with a lot trimmed out.
The inclusion of “Send a Message to Her” and “Chain Reaction” is curious. These songs aren’t on the standard version of the album, but are two of the most common bonus tracks attached to various other releases of Guero. That they are present and that there’s no audible differences between the leak and final versions of either track suggest these were finished fairly early in recording. They’re definitely the weak spots in the Ubiquitous running order, with “Chain Reaction” mostly being a “High 5” stream of consciousness Beastie Boys-esque rap rock thing with some Game Boy bleep bloops sprinkled in, and “Send a Message to Her” effectively being “Rental Car” by way of “Go It Alone”‘s bass tone. Still, they’re fun and catchy enough, and no Beck hardcore should miss having copies of ’em somewhere in their library.
Final audio nerd notes: the lowest-generation version of the leak I can find is 160kbps MP3s. If they’re any other bitrate or format, you have a lower-quality version of the leak. I have a program I love called mp3guessenc that looks at various audio nerd specs, block size and tag data and bit reservoir usage, to guess which program encoded the MP3. It thought that these were Fraunhofer-encoded MP3s, exactly like you’d get out of a DAW like Pro Tools or a commercial music program like iTunes.
Comparing the Drafts
The presence of “Chain Reaction” and “Send a Message to Her”, the mislabels, the weird running order, mp3guessenc’s data–they all hint at what I believe the source and form of the leak to be. I think this was a folder of nearly-complete and possibly even out-of-date-at-the-time track renders for songs slated for Guero in one form or another laying around on the computer of someone close to the process. We’re either looking at a leaker with access to that computer who took those songs and sent them to the hip, deep-inside-the-Web MP3 blogs of the day, or–and the explanation I think is most likely, actually–someone was careless about what they shared with P2P software, and one of those MP3 blogs just happened to find them and post them.
One of my favorite places to mine weird samples for my own music are people’s collections of “mic in tracks”. If you’re old enough to remember MusicMatch Jukebox, aside from just being a music library sorting program and MP3 player, it could record to MP3 from CD or from some kind of audio in, often a mic but “line in tracks” are not unheard of either. (These are named for their default file name that people quite often never changed.)
When people set up Napster, they would indiscriminately share MP3s from anywhere on their hard drive, including these mic in tracks. You might find that creepy, that recordings of people dicking around with their instruments, the book reports of small children, preachers speaking in tongues (as heard on my Last Summer EP from 2023), and insane rants about warty cocks were casually shared, accidentally and unwittingly, for anyone on these P2P networks to download, but I find it fascinating.
It makes too much sense that this is where Guero leaked out. Someone, an engineer, a remixer, Beck himself even, wanted some free music and forgot to limit which directories MP3s could get shared out of, and there went the album. Even if it wasn’t up for long, it was up for long enough that some MP3 blog with a keen sniffer found them and unveiled the long-awaited next Beck album to the world. The Nappy Cat Chronicles was maintained by avid music fans, the same kind who would be peeking around LimeWire for unreleased music, an avenue that wouldn’t require any direct connection to the musicmaking process or even Los Angeles itself to gain access to Guero. If there was a specific leaker behind the scenes, why was an unrelated, brand new, unheard-of MP3 blog was chosen as their venue to leak a major label album?
All of that said, I have no hard proof of it. This is just what makes the most sense to me looking at what I know.
Ubiquitous is more interesting for the context around it than what actually got leaked, which, exactly as Beck’s camp said, was simply an unmixed, unmastered, and nowhere near the intended running order version of Guero. The extended “Scarecrow” is great, the little differences are interesting to me and no one else, and I always prefer a more dynamic mix, lossy audio aside (and it’s fine sounding lossy audio, for what it’s worth). As a whole sequence, it’s just the album on shuffle, missing one of the best cuts and featuring two rightly deemed b-sides instead.
No, the interesting part is the snapshot in time Ubiquitous provides. Fansites continued to be relevant (and should still be, grumble grumble). P2P file sharing was an ongoing thorn in the side of labels and artists. MP3 blogs were starting to peak in relevance, the era of indie rock shared through RSS feeds and barely what we’d even consider social media. MySpace hadn’t crested the wave. YouTube hadn’t yet launched.
Five years later and it would’ve been leaked to YouTube, or maybe Megaupload. Ten years later and it would’ve gotten shared as a torrent, or maybe Google Drive links. Twenty and it’d all be streaming. But here in 2004, a network of in-the-know Blogger and Blogspot users with Rilo Kiley lyrics in their headers, through one method or another, got ahold of an incomplete snapshot of a long-awaited album from one of the most fascinating and occasionally perplexing artists of the 90s alt boom and gave it to the world.
And given Beck’s ideas for a multifaceted rollout where one set of songs morphs and takes the shape of its container, perhaps a RAR of rough mixes of the album on shuffle downloaded from a music nerd’s blog actually fits right in.
Thanks for reading this First Draft as always! These are fun to do every so often, definitely nice to revisit the format. If you’re interested in more, check the First Draft category where I talk about work-in-progress albums from the Pixies, Failure, Wilco, and who knows who else to come.
