Stayed (deterior demos)

	As far as I know, I’ve never been to Show Low. The song Stayed, though, lyrically located there, has traveled quite a bit.

Stayed was written somewhere in-between, initiated from a prompt, possibly about the SW, from a photographer-friend in New York — for a proposal that never had a showing, also as far as I know. 

If not specifically directed, I may’ve randomly picked the curiously-named Arizona town to put a place in mind because of the wide palette of imagined images the envisioning impressions might materialize. Either way, in my state of mind at the time, the mirage was briefly flush.

I found this mix in a file called deterior demos. “Deterior” was a working title for a batch of songs recorded on my Yamaha MD8 minidisc recorder in the late 90’s at various squats in Canada, on the heels of 1998’s Since, while I was focusing on other music that would become my 2000 album The Hill. 

After The Hill was released, the sequestered collection of MD8 demos then became part of an attempted-album project called “Slingshot.” There was a recording session on 2” tape for a week in Portland OR with a few friends, but the result was inconsequential, so the attempt was abandoned. Not sure where the tape is . . . 

Some songs from that period, re-recorded at home on my then-newly acquired Roland 2480 recorder, became integral pieces of 2002’s release Impasse. 

Stayed didn’t. It didn’t fit with the thread-in-my-head of Impasse. I revamped it, instead, for a side project that had me back with the Yamaha MD8, chauffeuring us to a well-fueled two-person think-tank in Chicago for a few days of remote buddy-recording in the apartment of a friend who let us use their place while they were out, collecting their rent. 

This is the first-draft arrangement picked on some long-lost nylon string, recorded worlds-ago in an Alberta basement: 

Stayed (deterior demos) :