Demonstration Tapes: You Were Here and Then You Were Gone (The Hazards of Love 0.5)

Oddly, the one that kicked it all off

I was digging through some old files and I found this long lost gem: a demo of a song that never quite found its way to the band, but managed to spark a whole album full of ideas.

There are times when certain lines or turns of phrases stick out to you and you sort of file them away with the idea of sounding them out in songs. The phrase “the hazards of love” was one such phrase, one that I’d borrowed from the title of an Anne Briggs EP. On the EP, no song was attached to the name; I figured it was fair game.

I was playing this kind of Marr-esque jangle-pop guitar line, came up with a decent verse melody, and landed the chorus using this phrase that had been stuck in my head. “And oh, the hazards of love / You were here and then you were gone.” A nice sentiment, fading youth and love and all that. I always liked the song pretty well, but I had the feeling that that line, the one about the hazards of love, had a greater purpose. I ended up writing a couple more songs using the line as a chorus hook — and that lead to making a whole record around the concept.

Anyway, here’s the innocuous tune that sparked that whole idea, recorded in a basement in SE Portland in 2006: