Bender returned from a the road in early 2001, exhausted and with no material for the follow-up to Jehovah's Hitlist. The pressure was immense. Early writing sessions were slow and strained, but eventually gave way to the band's most prolific and creative period ever. New songs began pouring out almost as fast as they could be written. Some fully formed, demoed and finished within a day or two. Dozens more fragments and unfinished ideas.
By mid-year they had stockpiled enough material for multiple releases. The excitement level at TVT was high. Famed producer Rick Parashar (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains) was on board and had reportedly cleared his calendar to remain ready for the project. But as can happen, fate (and business) intervened. The record never happened.
The tentative title for the album was A Straight Line From Here. Within the band, the material has always been referred to as… “The Demos”.
This music has been largely unheard since 2001.
Notes:
This isn't the entire bunch, but the strongest contenders for album consideration at the time. These are first-pass recordings. The sound quality varies and the performances are rough at times. The majority of the songs are incomplete. Kent Boyce had an uncanny ability to produce random “lyrics” on the fly as he was tracking vocal ideas, so there are a lot of unfinished or nonsense lyrics.
* "Never Gonna Fly" appears in National Lampoon's Van Wilder in this exact form, with garbled lyrics and glaring performance mistakes. The movie studio wanted the song and couldn't wait for a redo.
* A heavily reworked cover of "Whatever Gets You High" was released by The Loverhammers, featuring Marty Casey of Rockstar: INXS. That regrettably generic-rock version was retitled “Honest, I'll Wait” and appears on their Heavy Crown album.
