Dead Sea Scrolls

We could leap off of the infrastructure, choose our words less carefully…
— “Big Wide Empty”

Rock bands have secret lives.

These lives aren’t confined exclusively to the backstage areas where the public, if the band is lucky enough to trouble a public, is denied access. They aren’t merely the lives in which members act out private debauchery that would make their public debauchery look tame, or vice versa, nor reveal themselves to be more aroused by bottom lines than bass lines, nor even lament the fact that despite all the trappings of fame and glory they are still, at long last, dorks. (But boy, could he play guitar.)

No, the secret lives I mean are phantoms that run alongside the official story of a band’s career, usually known only to the band itself. Their limbs and organs are songs that don’t quite make the cut, projects laboured over and never seen through, all the things the members intend to do and never ultimately get around to doing. They constitute, in short, the band that the band wishes it could be.

In a way this sounds silly, since the best part of being in a band is self-determination, claiming what you like from tradition and telling the rest to go fuck itself as talent and inclination allow. But bands, because they are bands, are made up of more than just one self, and those selves tend to get into business and pleasure with still other selves… All of which makes the project of self-determination more and more complicated.

When Harvey Danger got started, none of us knew how to play music, write songs, be in a band, even a little. We were united by two things: consuming desire to figure out how to do all that stuff, and the certainty that no one else was interested in helping us—so we might as well help each other. More than just learning how to do it together, we learned how to learn how to do it together. This led to a process, which led to, at length, a certain confidence (and, when things went right, exhilaration verging on awe). But it didn’t translate into an obvious identity. We never sounded like a kind of band. Our songs never fit squarely into obvious styles, any more than any of us as individuals had a discernible identity or look. We were never punk, never indie, never alternative, never classic rock, never power pop, never drone, but we listened to and loved those bands, and our music incorporated elements of all of them. As I type this it sounds like a good problem to have, yet I remember the frustration of wanting the band to make sense to the world in a way I never felt like I could. I believe we all felt that way, and I know we were all gripped by measures of joy and chagrin when people started listening, and deciding for themselves what kind of band we were. We resisted the momentum of their definitions to a degree, but momentum is momentum. Apart from everything else, once you release your music to people, what people think of it is not up to you.

Faced with identity crisis, we took solace in our secret life, which is assembled in the songs in this collection. Some have been released before in limited editions, or on a literal B-side or putative soundtrack, most have been discovered by intrepid superfans. But to us, they remain the undiscovered, unofficial version of our oeuvre, the band only we knew we were. Some were scheduled for inclusion on record then got axed, either for time or tone or theoretical similarity to other recordings. Some didn’t feel fully cooked when they were made only to sound surprisingly fine, even killer, upon later listening. Some we just couldn’t decide about. “Big Wide Empty,” probably the most personal HD song ever, lingered in a state of near-completion for 10 years before we finally got it together. “Defrocked” and “Pity and Fear” were huge breakthroughs, each in their way, and ready to go before the first album even came out. “Plague of Locusts” isn’t much as a song, but the recording is thrilling to a middle-aged antitheist like me. Sometimes “My Human Interactions” sounds like a masterpiece. This version of “Cold Snap” always does. The session that produced it and “Mainland” and the original “Diminishing Returns”—featuring touring HD members Mike Squires and John Roderick—was so disastrous it broke up the band, but they sound like promising demos today. The live in-studio version of “Humility on Parade” feels more stealthy and assured than the LP version ever did. “You Look So Happy”: well, it’s hard when the chorus has the word “asshole” in it, but I always liked the little details, the vaguely eastern feel of the verses, the rich vein of sadness running through the whole song. I don’t know what to say about “The World’s Greatest Living Dancer,” other than I think it’s staggering when all the voices come in, and the guitar/bass interplay that basically forms the nucleus of the band never sounded better. Our now-legendary Christmas song was a commission from KROQ in LA, written and recorded in a single day (Aaron was sick, so John Goodmanson played bass)—definitely a masterpiece of its genre. Randy Newman’s achingly appropriate “Louisiana, 1927” was recorded live from the audience (obviously) at a benefit that raised $30,000 for the Red Cross in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; some band called Death Cab something or other played after us. And “Maneater,” well… sometimes you just gotta play a Hall & Oates song. 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.

Now that it is ending, I realize that the best of this material, especially “Big Wide Empty,” “Defrocked,” “My Human Interactions,” “The World’s Greatest Living Dancer,” and “Cold Snap,” is my favorite music we ever created. It’s not that the songs are better than others. It’s that they reveal more about our musical ambition—our willingness to look past our own definitions, to be less cautious even when it means failure—than most of what came out on our records. They remind me of our old friend Jason from This Busy Monster’s maxim that perfect is the enemy of good. Perhaps that’s the real reason we didn’t let people hear these songs. Somehow they needed to remain secret. Until now, of course.

— Sean Nelson
Summer, 2009