Fill Up The Room Demos

Unlike the "Every Night" demos, which were pretty much just rapid-fire songs that all kind of spilled out in an afternoon between tours, and the music for the first two SLGTM records, which were basically just demos that I kept adding instruments and reverb to until they sounded sweet, the songs for "Fill Up The Room", the fourth and most recent Saturday Looks Good To Me record went through a long period of reworking and re-envisioning. These six tracks are pretty much all that's worth listening to from the endless scraps of things that could have been songs I worked on for that record. This will be the last of the Saturday stuff for a while, new City Center jams and a mix of all other peoples demos on the way. Also a last-minute show on Saturday in NYC with some old friends is happening!!! Details as soon as I get them.

Photos are of my friend Sophie in London, taken on our 2007 Euro tour. I later made a drawing out of these pictures which would become the cover for Fill Up The Room.

Saturday Looks Good To Me "Apple" (2006 Demo)
The working title for this song was "Fill Up The Room", a song about being so excited and in love that your love transcends nature and you can fill the world or any given space with the feelings of newness and young joy. Made more sense as an album title. There were so many early versions of this song, I think this is one of the first. The singing sucks and it's pretty low-energy in general.

Saturday Looks Good To Me "When I Lose My Eyes" (2006 Demo)
This song, fairly epic on the record, also had about a dozen earlier versions. This is probably somewhere in the middle of the evolution. I knew the end had to be really big and percussive, but for some reason I might have been hung up on writing a song that sounded like what I thought Spoon sounded like without ever hearing them. This version is so ridiculous because it's like a kid at a party trying to be mad at his friends and put on an angry act, but eventually he just starts having fun and totally forgets to act mad. The beginning of the song sounds so fake in comparison to the end and it's quickly forgotten. Most of the non-drum percussion at the end is me hitting the pipes and walls in my basement with drumsticks.

Saturday Looks Good To Me "Hands In The Snow" (2006 Instrumental Demo)
Scott Sellwood leading the song with electric piano, this song was demoed out in my basement right before I left Michigan for Portland. I was listening to a ton of Elliot Smith and wanted to make a song that called to mind the inverse of Belle & Sebastian and Elliot Smith ripping off Left Banke and The Zombies. What would it sound like if the Zombies ripped them off? Not sure if it worked, but the sleigh bells sound nice here but were omitted from the album version.

Saturday Looks Good To Me "Come With Your Arms" (2006 Demo)
Working title for this song was "Hospital Teeth", based on a really intense period in the spring of 2006 when a friend had what seemed like infected teeth, but turned out to be a nerve disorder that used to be called "The Suicide Disease" because before there was treatment for it people who got it just killed themselves because it was the worst possible pain known to man. Going to the emergency room multiple times in a single day and trying to take care of someone who really felt as bad as people could feel gave me this song about love, pain, loving yourself and escaping the entire play for a moment, whatever it takes to get outside of uncertainty. I sang it directly into my computer, hence the abysmal sound. The rest of these demos were cassette four-tracked.

Saturday Looks Good To Me "Apple" (2006 Instrumental Demo)
The second of what was around ten demos/maybe-this-one-will work recordings of this song. Sellwood played electric piano, and I played everything else. This was for sure near the end and close to what became the album version, as it just kept getting freakier and more violent or loose. I think the harmonizing is way better on this demo than it ended up on the record. That happens.

Saturday Looks Good To Me "Luck Of Clouds" (2006 Demo)
After I moved to Portland there was a period when everyone I played a finished version of the record for pretty much across-the-board felt like it was unfinished. I had to re-think it and eventually I made up a bunch of new songs and re-worked the other ones. This song, "Peg", "Make A Plan" and "(even if you die on the) Ocean" were the songs that I made in Portland. I can't remember why this one didn't make it past the demo stage, maybe because it was another super-slow song and I never made lyrics completely, but now I think it's the best song of all of these. Maybe someday it will get realized, or maybe that day is happening now?