TL;DR: We played a gig and recorded some stuff a long time ago. It was fun, we had a great time and I’ll never forget it. One of those songs was this song you are currently listening to. We never released it. Why? I don’t know. The world moves on. Enjoy.
...
The recordings for “The Last City” originally began many years ago in Austin, Texas when Caulbearer was rehearsing for their first (and so far only) live performance opening for Theologian in 2013.
Ben and I had collected bits and pieces of sound that we each arranged into an extended 20-minute piece that would approximate our debut performance. We ran through it a number of times and deemed it worthy for public consumption. It had a beginning, middle and end. Most of all, it seemed to be cohesive, flowed easily from section to section and could be repeated with slight variations each time we played it.
For all intents and purposes, it was a proper song with a basic structure that could be performed anywhere. That “cohesive structure” is important when you think of how amorphous and meandering music of this sort can sound to the uninitiated listener. It not only felt that we had a ready-made performance in our sonic arsenal, but it also felt like we had turned a corner in our musical abilities by bringing all of these disparate sounds together into a fully fleshed-out form.
At the time, I believe we were calling the piece “You Will Not Survive” or something like that. I am not so sure why we ultimately decided on the current title, I am sure there is some forgotten back-story here, but it’s irrelevant and has been apparently forever lost to time.
Following a successful performance at a seedy bar/performance space in an impoverished area east of the city of Austin (what the hell was the name of that place?) Ben and I set to work on a final jam the next day before he headed back to New Mexico and Caulbearer was once again reduced to digital file sharing instead of live, face-to-face musical creation.
That particular jam session will be forever vivid in my mind. We were loose, we were spontaneous and the show had set our creative gears in motion. The pumps were primed and we were in a great mood, having deemed our one live outing a complete and total success. Our friendship was strong, the spirits were with us and the weather was of a particular and indescribable sort that creates a mood of ease, peace and limitlessness. All of this and more combined to fuel our musical creativity and we jammed for a couple of hours, capturing all of it on our digital recording devices. A great deal of spectacular music came out of that last Caulbearer session, one of them being another run-through of the live set (again, with a different title than what it is now called.)
After this weekend, Caulbearer still continued to work on material from a distance but the flow was sporadic and less concentrated than it had been. Eventually, “The Last City” (and another accompanying album’s worth of material) was completed and mastered from that last Austin jam session but for reasons none of us know to this day, the song was never released. There’s an even deeper back-story to this concerning the other material that was recorded and created from that last session, but that’s for another release and another time.
Why do bands create music and get excited about it only to have it sit and rot, collecting dust in the corner, to never be heard by anyone other than themselves? It’s a question I’ve never been able to answer and it’s a problem that has continually plagued Caulbearer. We’re often extremely prolific and creative behind the scenes, amassing mountains of music in various stages of completion, but we tend to stuff the results into a folder after it’s complete rather than releasing it to the general public.
I don't think this is intentional, this "creating and hiding" but I can't account for it most of the time. We often speak at great lengths about the artwork that should accompany the music, the labels we'd hoped to have release it other than my own small label, the friends and fellow musicians who would find great interest in our music, etc. More often than not, we are always very excited about the creation of Caulbearer music, it's never been a burden or a chore and we do it lovingly and willingly.
A psychoanalyst might say that this tendency stems from a fear of failure and rejection, that we deem ourselves less worthy of inclusion and acceptance than our already lauded peers. Maybe there's some truth to this but I tend to think that we get so enthralled and wrapped up in the excitement of creation that the energy it takes to bring our creations together into a cohesive, physical package after all is said and done seems to put a damper on the thrill of co-creating music together and we so we just continue on with the creation of new material while our past achievements settle into darkness.
This is something I hope we can start to remedy this year and we’re choosing to wade through all of the seemingly endless dead-end jams, amazing ideas and finished tracks/albums that have been relegated to the dark corners of our minds and computers.
credits
released January 11, 2019
Sounds/Photography/Artwork: Cody Spence Drasser & Ben Roe, Jr.
Mastering: James Plotkin
Created: 2013-2014
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