In 1992 I lived in Winter Park, Florida with my best friend and primary musical collaborator, Mato. We called ourselves The Distractions and moved to the Orlando area in hopes of attending Full Sail Recording School. Mato did ultimately attend and graduate. I never enrolled in classes. Finances eventually sent me back to New York, where I started my band Shu. You can read more about that history here.
During our year in Florida, Mato and I drank like fish, made a bunch of crazy friends, and wrote/recorded hundreds of weird tunes. We never released any of the songs, although we’ve kicked the MP3 files around for years.
One of the songs never made it into the MP3 archive. However, despite not having been heard in over 30 years, it recently found its way back to my mind. I was singing the song “Dead Crow” incessantly. I became obsessed with finding the recording. It proved to be a more challenging and fruitful task than expected.
In my studio, I have drawers full of old 4-track cassette tapes, all dating back to last century. I began my “Dead Crow” quest by segregating the Florida recordings. This narrowed the search to approximately 120 cassettes. My goals did not extend beyond the tune tormenting my subconscious. I just wanted to find “Dead Crow”, the song living rent-free in my OCD brain.
The problem was that I had no idea which of the tapes housed the song in question. I had to listen to them all. While doing so, I recorded the contents of each cassette to my computer, digitizing the entire Florida collection. I did eventually find the song I was looking for, on tape #117.
So, here it is; “Dead Crow”, a strange little unfinished tune from 34 years ago. It features vocal, guitar, bass, and drum machine. I wrote the lyrics and melody as I walked to my telemarketing job in the hot Florida summer sun, and then recorded the tune when I returned to my apartment at the end of the work day. It was almost lost to history, but now exists in the world solely to satiate my own internal idiosyncrasies.
Now that the search is complete, I am left with a digital archive of 150 songs which only a handful of people have ever heard. I’m thinking a box set may be in order. 🙂 Until then, enjoy “Dead Crow”, written and recorded in 1992, mixed, mastered, and released in 2026 on House of Static Records.