“How Could You?”
*Wild Card* - February ‘21
So now that I feel most of you have been indoctrinated enough into the “One Big Dark Room” catalog, I thought I might begin to introduce a bit more of the “moorhaunter” songs.
The recording I’m posting here in the primary spot in the header is a more developed demo that I put together with my friend Gavin Castleton. I think this recording is about a year after I first wrote the song (I’m including the original demo for you to hear as the second attachment in this post if you want to check it out).
At the time of the above recording, I was still kinda going back and forth with my label about what direction we wanted to go for “It Will Reveal Itself” (the third "Lex Land" album to follow up "Were My Sweetheart to Go..."). This was before I had fully committed to taking the “Lex Land” project more into the jazz world, and with “Sweetheart” bearing tracks as aggressive and even dance-pop as “Havana” and “How Well You Do,” I felt like we really could have taken it anywhere.
At the time of writing the song originally, I was deep into “The Game” (writing songs once a week or facing permanent group exile, hosted by Bob Schneider) and surely originally wrote this song for that, though I can’t recall now what the prompt was.
It appears I finished recording the original demo on February 1, 2012. Which is probably correct.
At that point, I was just about landing after couchsurfing for a while post-The-Voice and a tour season, and was then living with some friends on Austin’s East Side. I was still feeling pretty hurt from a rough relationship that lit me up and then crashed and gloriously burned the year or so before, so this song was definitely about that.
I know I was still living at my friend Jordan’s place at the time because in the orginal demo I used his old upright piano. He had this little storage shed in the back of the house and I would go in there pretty often to write or even film videos (like this one), and I definitely wrote this in there. I didn’t live there much longer - I moved in temporarily with a few acquaintances in a house in South Austin and spent a few miserable months living and working before finally moving with my close friend Michelle into a spot that really felt our own, and I had a real closet for the first time in a long time.
A year later, struggling still to get anything going for the new album, my label sent me to Portland, OR to work up some demos with Gavin, and we ended up producing these songs that really feel like the beginning of Moorhaunter to me. This is just one of them, and he ended up using another one, our favorite, on a release he put together for his own project later that year or the next, the #Blessed mix tape - "Do You Right" (a song I originally wrote about Maria when she was still alive, circa 2006).
That week working on these recordings was SUCH a fun week getting to collaborate with GavCaz (one of my favorite things on planet earth), and we also got another old and mutual friend of ours, guitarist Isaac Bolivar, to come up from Oakland for the second part of it and goof off and lay down tracks with us.
For the fondness associated with that week, I really like this recording because you can hear all our voices on it.
The tunes and recordings from these sessions have basically been buried and quasi-forgotten, though I did start to perform as “moorhaunter” in 2013 and tried to put together a few things, and these are now part of that collection.
Now that we have a bigger space where we can film, record, rehearse, and stream, I’m hoping I can start to put some more energy back into the moorhaunter project, becasue I think it would be super fun to resurrect her.
If you happen to need a jilted-lover broken-hearted pissed off dance track for your solo Saturday night dance party, then this’ll be perfect 😜
As always, thank you for supporting me in my journey to make the art I feel I need to make to share with the world. You’re helping me shine a light in dark places where I feel it might be needed.
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❤️ Lex
Here’s the original demo where I laid down parts:
for fun, here’s the original voice memo from when I first thought of the lead melody - this was dated a month before the demo… so maybe I wrote this song in January 2012 or late December 2011?
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