AineteEkaterini wrote:
It interests me that we now have nine songs which never made it onto the album, <...>
Actually, there's also "
Age of the Dollar", "
The Boy" (dismissed by John Parish and Flood, and hence probably unfinished) and "
Imagine This" (
Romario thinks it's an early version of "
Chain Of Keys", I don't).
Plus, about these four songs about Kosovo ("Pity for the Old Road", "The Red Road", "Clothes of Grief" and "Where is Our City?") - I believe they were never mentioned on the chart wall during the sessions, so I'm thinking they were never even considered to be a full band numbers [I think she always have songs which are deemed to exist only as demos - for example, it's really hard for me to imagine "Easy", "Dance" or "Liverpool Tide" with drums and stuff]. I also think that she has much more demos from Kosovo and both other trips, and these were just selected by the people behind the radio play. Also, in some interview she said that it takes quite a lot of time for a set of words to "decide for itself" what it is going to be - a poem, a piece of prose, or a song (maybe 2 or 3 simultaneously), and that she often sings her poems (or says them out loud) to edit, and I wouldn't be all that surprised to know if she has a song version for almost every poem from "
The Hollow of the Hand".
About "White Chalk": in KCRW interview she said that initially there was 40 or 50 songs and song ideas, then before the recording they selected about 20 - they recorded for half a year, so there might be a 9 or so recorded tracks which "weren't good enough", or maybe too personal. [I wonder if "Bitter Little Bird" is one of them.] That's a shame, of course.
About "LES" - they recorded it in one month, there were some sonic challenges (sound engineer said they worked very hard to sound, funnily enough, "NOT like in church"), plus at first there were only 3 musicians including PJ (and Jean-Marc Butty came in on a later stage of recording), so I think 14 known tracks might be all they recorded (although I certainly wouldn't mind to hear more - such a fantastic album that is).