This is the last of CW's four-track recordings, recorded in the only bedroom in CW's rental house in Des Moines. "I'd be recording a bass track, for example, with Ernest at the controls, and I'd need to look at the chart on the music stand. I'd look at Ernest and say 'Duck!' Then I'd turn to the right, swinging the bass' neck over his head, check the chart, and turn back."
"Sheila Sometimes" and "Kiss Me Once," songs originally intended for Sound System's still-unfinished masterpiece A Safe Place, were recorded in a fit of frustration. "I'd been messing around with the arrangements for the old album, and had hoped to get together with Steve and Justin and finally finish it. I had the new four-track, and Steve still had his, so we figured it would be pretty simple to mail tapes back and forth to one another and finally put this thing to rest."
But the sessions never really panned out -- all three musicians were too busy with "life getting in the way." CW completed the two Safe Place songs himself to put on Escape From Pennsylvania, then he wrote "Some Small Treasure" as a sort of requiem for the Sound System project.
"Something 'Bout the Dark" was recorded in his grandfather's home in Pleasantville a few months earlier. "When I moved back to Iowa from New York, I had everything I owned packed in the back of my Ford Tempo," CW recalls. "Never had any problem with anyone trying to steal my stuff, but in the twenty minutes I was unloading at Grandpa's house, someone reached in and ripped off my Korg drum machine. That's the only time in my life someone has ever stolen any of my equipment."
Never one to let small details stop him, he called his friend Marc Rahe across town. "I remembered he'd had an old Ludwig drum kit lying around, and asked him if I could borrow it for a few days. He told me I could just have it. So I recorded 'Something 'Bout the Dark' that afternoon, and wound up moving the kit with me to Des Moines a couple months later and finished the album with it there."
Cassette cover art
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Track listing
1 Something 'Bout the Dark (4:27)
2 Arthur (4:09)
3 Sheila Sometimes (3:42)
4 Kiss Me Once (4:23)
5 Don't Just Stand There (3:45)
6 Once In a Lifetime (3:41)
7 Some Small Treasure (3:44)
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