Not all the songs that I played with Moondog made it to the recording studio. Part of my songwriting practice was recording demos on the 4-track cassette recorder that Nate Harris and I shared. Here are a couple of my best recordings on that venerable device.

During the Moondog days, we must have had three or four songs entitled “You.” I blame teenage yearning and hopeless social lives for that. Nonetheless, our set lists were always a bit confusing. This is the best and my favorite version of the “You” song. I recorded a demo in my bedroom, but this song never made it to the studio. One of the reasons might be the fact that I broke my pinky finger after I recorded this demo, and was never able to play guitar as skillfully afterward. We did have another favorite song, too, named “Freight Train” instead of “You,” which had an awesome intro where we all imitated the click-clacks and whistle wails of a train pulling out of a station. Sadly, I was never able to record that one. It probably wouldn’t hold up as well as “You” does, anyway.

I wrote the song “You Don’t Know” in the late fall my junior year of high school. I remember that it was an all-consuming 4-track recording session, started in the late afternoon, broken up by a visit to a friend’s house to watch “Animal House,” and ended in the late evening. I was really, really excited when I mixed it all down to what you hear in this track. I really think that it captures the angst and desire that I felt at the time, and for many years after I wrote it, too. I recorded this song in the studio with my band, Moondog, for the “Unleashed” EP.