Dead Sea Scrolls : HDDB : The Harvey Danger Database

Phonographic Records
phono 03

Dead Sea Scrolls

Released August 15, 2009

Track listing

Big Wide Empty – 6:28
My Human Interactions – 5:13
Humility on Parade [live in studio] – 4:53
Save It for Later – 3:52
Cold Snap [demo] – 5:08
Mainland [demo] – 4:09
Pity and Fear – 4:27
Plague of Locusts – 3:19
Maneater [live] – 4:16
Diminishing Returns [demo] – 3:31
Louisiana, 1927 [live] – 3:11
You Look So Happy [demo] – 5:43
Defrocked – 7:31
The World’s Greatest Living Dancer – 5:50
Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas (Sometimes) – 5:12

Credits

All songs written by Harvey Danger, except #4, #9, and #11
Cover art: Gala Bent, “Visible Light Spectrum”, watercolor, 2006

Quotes

SCN: I cite R.E.M.‘s Dead Letter Office. Not many great songs, but a fucking lot of great parts, great ideas, and a cover of Aerosmith that I still prefer to the original. Plus the liner notes! Obviously, this shit is for nerds only. But nerds are my people. And to the people who have liked our band for a long time, whose desire for Harvey Danger music was too intense to be slaked by our three albums, those “B-sides” have become much beloved.
— Globecat interview, June 2008

SCN: Together, all these songs formed our parallel universe—magna opera, interesting failures, studio goofs, ideas beyond our grasp which demonstrated, if only to ourselves, the persistence of our reach. Even the ones that didn’t quite feel “good” enough to put on a record became part of our evolution, particles of the infinite possibility our band represented to us when it began.^DSS

Notes

Self-released by the band’s own Phonographic Records.
Liner notes include an essay by Sean Nelson.
Released as a free download from harveydanger.com on September 10, 2010 (the same day The Final Recording was released).
This compilation was being considered by the band as early as the fall of 2002, and in February 2003, Aaron confirmed a release was being planned: There’s no date for the release and things are moving kind of slowly, but it’ll happen eventually. It will be a mixture of previously-released but hard-to-find songs, studio recordings of songs you might have only heard live versions of, and newer stuff that nobody’s heard yet.^BB
Metadata for “Pity and Fear” [Cruel Intentions version] contains clues to an early, alternate tracklist for DSS, as well as the following (otherwise unpublished) description of the album: A collection of b-sides, c-sides, and everybody-look-at-me-sides, released in an extremely limited edition in 2009.