Unreleased Demos (2004-2006)
A collection of B-sides, rejects, and rough demos, listed in alphabetical order for quick reference!
I've basically been saving up these songs to comprise another full-length album, but—eh, who has the time? Better to let you listen to them now than hold onto them indefinitely. You'd probably never hear them, then.
"Share the love," am I right?
(1:35 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 3.3 MB)
Recorded in April 2005. Just one in a handful of songs that I recorded with throbbing, basic drumbeats and repetitive, catchy basslines. This one reminds me of The Beatles' "Get Back," for some reason. I think it's the similarity between my subdued bass solo and The Beatles' creamy lead guitar. And that we're both awesome and adored by millions. Oh, hey, this song's about the idea of infidelity.
(3:14 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 4.5 MB)
Recorded in February 2005. This is how I feel about kids. A friend thought this song would be more effective if it were stripped down to its bare essentials and played on acoustic guitar. But I am so, so lazy. Forget that.
Black Hat.
(2:48 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 3.9 MB)
Recorded in April 2004. This is a B-side from Dan Greene 1. The style and subject matter just didn't fit the tone of the album, so I set it aside with the intention of including it on Dan Greene 2, but I don't see a Dan Greene 2 listed anywhere on this site, do you? So, now it goes on the junk heap.
(3:10 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 4.4 MB)
Recorded in October 2005. "Break My Heart" was a response to unreliable friends—people I thought I really clicked with and would know for the rest of my life, who just turned out to be really flakey and let our friendship fizzle out. I was experimenting with alternating rhythms and tempos, and ended up with choruses that sound like Dire Straits. That means I wasn't very happy with this one.
(3:26 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 4.8 MB)
Recorded in November 2005. Upon the recommendation of a friend, I slowed the song down a bit, changed the guitar tone, took out some embarrassing lyrics, and left some breathing room between lines. It's still not that good, but it's an improvement.
(4:50 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 6.7 MB)
Recorded from September-November 2004. Ohhh shit! Here it is! This is what I consider to be the best song I have ever written (even though a friend told me that the guitar solo in the middle seemed out-of-place, and that musically, I was turning into a "weird robot"). I love everything about this song. It's got a great bassline, satisfying chord progression, heavily-veiled abstract lyrics, and my wife Karen provided these beautifully haunting backing vocals that send a chill down my spine. I entered this song in a competition held by MNartists.org to find the "new voices" in Minnesota music. Out of 250 entries, "Crisis of Conscience" was picked as one of 20 songs to be released on a professionally-pressed compilation called The Music of Here. Now. They gave away copies at the Minnesota State Fair, and I was even invited to perform in-studio at some college radio station, but by that time I had already moved to California and realized that music would only be a part of my life as a hobby. Anyway, if you only listen to one song while visiting my website, this should be the one. Of course, now that I've talked it up, it will inevitably suck. Sorry.
(6:40 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 9.2 MB)
Recorded in January 2005. A very sad song about what I consider a very sweet sentiment. A friend informed me that the "rock-out" part at the end is just plain awful, though.
(4:01 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 5.6 MB)
Recorded in February 2005. This is an updated version of a song that I had written & recorded a few years earlier on my four-track. I chopped out a verse or two, added some synth cello (synth by necessity, not by choice) and some gritty drums and called it a day. A friend told me that this reminds him of Red House Painters' music. On the surface, the song recalls a time when I tried to take a picture of a bizarre-looking sunset, but underneath, it means so much more...
(3:43 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 5.2 MB)
Recorded in June 2005. This is my one and only attempt at writing a political/protest song. I apologize. It will never happen again. Ever. I only include it here for the sake of curiosity.
(6:16 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 8.7 MB)
Recorded in April 2004. Another song written for the still-born album Dan Greene 2. This one details my urban paranoia and my anger towards early-morning garbage collection. There's another version of this song still in the works—not so grungy this time—but don't hold your breath.
(3:36 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 5 MB)
Recorded in February 2005. When my wife and I were dating in college, she used to return home during the summers. One summer, we had a fight the day before she had to fly home, and it pretty much cast a shadow over the whole summer. Our relationship was up in the air, and there was no opportunity to reconcile face-to-face, which made it even more excruciating. Here's a little ditty all about that summer. This one's a little too emo—maybe a little too Sunny Day Real Estate—but I still like the song (just not the production). Ooo! It also gave me an opportunity to play the gambang that Karen bought for me (the little distorted "beep-beep-beep-boops" you can hear during the instrumental sections.
(7:46 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 10.7 MB)
Recorded in May 2004. This is another updated version of a song that I had recorded on four-track. It's about a friend of mine who got kicked out of school. What a drag.
(3:23 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 4.7 MB)
Recorded in November 2005. A song about the bitter dissolution of a relationship. The lyrics weren't quite where I wanted them, but I went ahead and recorded them anyway.
(3:23 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 4.7 MB)
Recorded in December 2005. I mixed up the lyrics and made them more abstract, and tried to nail the rhythm of my vocals to the rhythm of the lead guitar. This is another of those simple-drums, repetitive-bassline songs I was striving for in 2005. A friend of mine said he really likes the build-up to the rockin' part at the end. Thanks, friend.
(4:34 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 6.3 MB)
Recorded from April-May 2004. I usually try to keep the subject of this song a secret, because I think it's supremely uncool, but what the hell. It's about Woody Allen and how awful it was to see him flounder through a relentless string of bad movies in the early 2000s, which only demonstrated how out-of-touch he was with the modern world and the changing face of humor. Did you see Anything Else? Probably the worst film of his entire career. Just painful. He's since redeemed himself with Match Point and, to a lesser extent, Scoop, but I thought that rough patch (roughly from Small Time Crooks through Melinda and Melinda) would never end. So there you have it; a lament for Woody Allen. What a film geek!
(3:25 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 4.8 MB)
Recorded in July 2006. This song was recorded for the express purpose of completely surprising my wife at our wedding reception. My boss and co-workers even helped me shoot a goofy music video to go along with it, and we schemed to show the music video at the reception without tipping off Karen. I feel really bad about the deception involved, but the look on her face made it all worth the effort. This one has a few extra credits than my normal recordings: Music performed by me (vocals, guitar), Caleb Whang (guitar), Susan Whang (bass), Brian Lim (drums), Patrick Shen (backing vocals), Julie Jung (cello) and Ellen Jung (violin). They're all great. Recorded and mixed by Caleb Whang.
(3:30 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 4.9 MB)
Recorded in July 2006. I recorded this version of "Someplace" so Patrick could come up with his vocal harmonies. I just love its simplicity, especially in comparison with the final version of the song, which gets pretty crazy by the end.
(4:53 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 6.8 MB)
Recorded in June 2005. If you want to hear one of my weirdest songs, here it is, sucka! This song has synthesized accordians, distorted pianos, falsetto vocals pushed to the very threshold of my vocal range, and a woozy theramin autographed by Bob Moog himself (on loan from my friend Andy Ferris). It's a good old-fashioned murder ballad, too, in the tradition of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
The String.
(3:24 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 4.7 MB)
Recorded in February 2005. This song began with a slight play on words scribbled on a scrap of paper. Oh wait, that's how all of my songs began.
(1:57 | MP3 |192 kbps | 2.8 MB)
Recorded in November 2005. I don't remember how I wrote this song. Probably with a pen and paper. I guess it's just a story about a beauty who leads people on. I like the line, "You twirl your hair/Like marching band batons," though. This first version of the song is too fast; the tone seems incongruous with the content.
(2:10 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 3 MB)
Recorded in November 2005. I basically just slowed down the tempo for this version. It makes a world of difference, though. When I listen to this song, I envision a parade in slow-motion. Everyone in the parade looks cheerful, but the slowness creates a sad, ominous vibe.
(3:34 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 5 MB)
Recorded in November 2005. Another update of an old four-track song. I'm really happy with the fuzzed bassline that cuts in and out. This one's pretty good, I think. Thematically similar to "Break My Heart," it's addressed towards someone who really disappointed me.
(1:47 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 2.5 MB)
Recorded in December 2004. This is a quaint little instrumental track. Most people (who don't appreciate the subtle differences in pieces of music) misidentify this as "Stairway to Heaven." I wish this was "Stairway to Heaven." Gotta love the unintentional flattery, though.
(3:35 | MP3 | 192 kbps | 5 MB)
Recorded in June 2005. Featuring the vocal stylings of my pal Haylee Hall, I wrote "Unladylike" as a throwback to an old-timey style of blues that probably only exists within my warped sense of musical history. It's a tongue-in-cheek approximation of the type of song that I imagine a "liberated woman" in the 1940s or 1950s would have sung about—you know, onstage in some smoky, ribald, underground jazz club (or something to that effect)—so it's a little bit cheeky, a little "winking." Plus, it was just fun coming up with ridiculous lines like, "I sit real loose, like a shortstop in the dugout" and then making Haylee sing them. She's a good sport. We recorded her vocals last-minute, right before she left to live in Italy for a few months.
