Apocrypha : HDDB : The Harvey Danger Database

As of 2025, almost Harvey Danger’s entire œuvre has been cleared for, and made available on, digital music platforms. The few rare gems that remain un-streamed are freely circulated among fans, and at this point, it’s possible that nearly everything listenable has already been offered up for listening.

Nevertheless: sharp-eyed HD fans have, over the years, collected a series of titles, tantalizing mysteries about which virtually nothing else is extant. Some are known to never have been finished. Others were allegedly performed live, but never recorded. At least a couple are probably just jokes from the practice space.

Nevertheless…

1994 demo outtakes

The setlist for one of HD’s first out-of-town shows (in Eugene, OR)^FLK included most of the songs on the ’94 demo tape, early appearances of “Old Hat” and “Maneater”, and four others: “Holiday”, “Stitches”, “Busker”, and “Hurried Love & Kisses from Tokyo, Love, Daddy”.

1996 demo outtakes

The band started recording with John Goodmanson in early ’96, in sessions which produced their second demo tape, the first half of what became Merrymakers, the aforementioned “Holiday”, “Stitches”, and “Busker”, plus “Wedlock” (which was shortlisted for Merrymakers; see below). There is no evidence any of the latter four recordings were ever heard outside the band’s inner circle.

Merrymakers outtakes

An early shortlist for the album appeared in the “grab bag” section of the band’s website around 1999, captioned by Jeff:

This piece of paper (on the back of one of our homemade press releases) was posted in our living room, and was the list of songs under consideration for the album. The songs outlined in black were ones that made it (though some were eventually dropped); the black checkmarks indicated the songs were already recorded. Each member of the band voted (you can see the letters corresponding to our names) for the other songs they wanted to record; a circle over the initial meant that that person felt only so-so about recording the song.

Based on the checkmarks and known recording dates, this list was drawn up some time between June 1996 and February 1997.

“Rolling Roads” was an early title for “Problems and Bigger Ones”. (You follow the rolling road…)^10A “Cool James” was eventually rearranged, recorded and released on Little by Little…; “Plague of Locusts” and “The World’s Greatest Living Dancer” were recorded in the KJV sessions.

“Lidsville Lunchbox” and “Foot-Controlled Activator” may have been played at the OK Hotel Cafe in 1996.^? Sean posted lyrics to the latter on the official forums in 2010.

On the old HD message board, Aaron said of “Portland or Hell”:

I’m pretty sure that song was never even finished. If it was, it was probably only played at one show back in 1996 or something.

A bootleg of “Lester Ballard” (named after the main character in Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel Child of God) has been circulating since 1999 or 2000.

While it doesn’t appear on the recording shortlist, there may have been a pre-Merrymakers song titled “Cream of Bastards”, which may have been the origin of the line in “Pike St./Park Slope” about paying dues.^? Any connection with “Cream and Bastards Rise” is unclear: prior to 2004, Sean had been trying for years to work Paul Newman’s line from Harper into a song,^AD so they may have nothing else in common.

“Save It for Later” session outtakes

In December 1998/January 1999, Harvey Danger entered the studio to record a cover of a song from 1979–1981, to be included in the MTV film 200 Cigarettes. Their label ultimately insisted on the English Beat’s “Save It for Later”; two other candidates, Devo’s “Beautiful World” and Duran Duran’s “Is There Something I Should Know?”, eventually appeared on the Unreleased Stuff CD-R compilation.

According to Sean, at least two additional covers were recorded in those sessions: David Bowie’s “DJ”,^ASW and an unknown XTC cover.^10A Neither has ever been released.

In an April 4, 1999 appearance on MTV’s 120 Minutes (transcript, YouTube) Sean read a long list of artists the band had considered:

Wings, XTC, Blondie, Todd Rudgren… Flock of Seagulls, Magazine, Joe Jackson, Roxy Music, New Order, Gary Newman, Randy Newman, Cheap Trick, Human League, Talking Heads, Stranglers, The Knack, The Kinks, Elvis Costello, Yaz, Depeche Mode, Swell Maps, Jam, Devo, The Fall, Clash, Billy Joel, Lou Reed, The Embarrassment, The Pretenders, Gang of Four, Wire, Gear Television, [Richard Hell and] the Voidoids.

Notably, this list excludes both Bowie and Duran Duran.

King James Version demo disc

File metadata in the 25th anniversary bonus trove reveals that a 10-track CD titled “KJV demos” (by the artist “Harvey Danger Demos & Roughs”) was encoded using iTunes v11.0.1, and had a partial tracklist of:

All five of these demos are known to have been recorded around February 1999, before the band went to Bearsville Studios to start working on the album in earnest.

Potential candidates for the missing five tracks are demos for “Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo”, “Why I’m Lonely”, “Thrilling Conversation”, and/or “Pike St./Park Slope”, all of which were included in the trove—but as WAV files with no metadata to confirm or deny—also, that’s only four.

Other KJV outtakes

An unfinished song called “Something Else Again” is mentioned in the liner notes to the 25th anniversary vinyl release.

The ending of “You Look So Happy” appears under the title “Being a Brief Note of Apology” in the Lynn Shelton film We Go Way Back, and on live bootlegs from the era.^?

“Mainland” was played live in 2000 (and introduced as a brand-new song) under its working title “Main Line”, with slightly different lyrics.

“Nervous Breakdown On-the-Floor-Style”, a song about the Mary Kay Letourneau case, may have been performed once on KNDD,^? but no recordings have ever surfaced. However, Sean posted the lyrics to the official forum in 2004 or 2005.

Little By Little… outtakes

Two titles that Aaron mentioned in a pre-production blog post never saw the light of day: “Deep Note” (a “troubled” song shelved by the band prior to recording) and “High-Tension Wires”, later confirmed^? to have been abandoned.

Dead Sea Scrolls rough draft

A compilation of leftover tracks was being considered as early as the fall of 2002, and in February 2003, Aaron confirmed plans for 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 These plans were most likely superseded when Aaron, Jeff, and Sean decided to reunite the band in late 2003/early 2004 and record an album of entirely new material.

Metadata for “Pity and Fear” [Cruel Intentions version] lists the song as track #17 on an 18-track version of Dead Sea Scrolls—which was ultimately released with only 15 tracks. Tags embedded into the file by iTunes include approximate lengths for the other songs on the disc… which means it’s possible to infer the entire tracklist:

…And the rest

The remaining titles in this section have been associated with Harvey Danger… at some point… somewhere… by someone. Sources and additional information are essentially nil. Included here, for the sake of posterity/gullibility/future gloating:

“Anna Said”
“A Certain Prof”
“(I’m) Down with Girlfriends”
“Frank Black” – most likely named for the frontman of The Pixies
“If Irony Were Alcohol, I’d Be Blacked Out by Now”
“Less than 12 Parsecs” – may have been played at the OK Hotel Cafe in 1996^?; obviously a Star Wars reference

Help wanted

If you know anything more about any of the songs listed above (lyrics, demo sessions, alternate titles, live performance dates, info from the old forums, etc.) or if you know about any unreleased Harvey Danger songs not listed above—please contact z@hddb.xyz with as many details as possible.