Sula

demos iii, bonus

Why one of our most requested songs has never been released.

I’m not sure if the others think this way, but there is always at least one show that I can attach to every song we have played. Some errant pathway in my brain keeps a line between a song and a place. When I think of Sula, I think of the hundreds of times we have played that song, but two shows rise to the top. In chronological order.. the first was in 2014 at a chocolate store in the dead of winter in Minneapolis at 8am. There exists no digital evidence of this having happened, but I assure you we played at the Droolin’ Moose Confectionary to a crowd of 6 or people or less. We blasted those ≤6 lucky viewers with 25 minutes of the loudest acoustic set in human history. Sula was no doubt a crowd favorite. A lukewarm applause and individual bags of chocolate-covered pretzels awaited us after the performance.

The second was at the Santa Monica pier in 2015 when we opened for Real Estate and played to what felt like the largest crowd of our career (the beauty of a captive audience). We were riding high from just having concluded our first-ever US and UK tour in the months prior. We flew out to do a one-off performance at the pier, and to, of course, take some meetings with the biggest labels in town. Virgin, Capital, the usual suspects. Being the awkward, self-conscious teens we still were at the time, the meetings did not go well. Against our managers’ better advice, we couldn’t help but crack sarcastic remarks and inside jokes during the lengthy meetings. Anything to alleviate the pressure and formality of seeing your hero’s diamond records on the wall. Needless to say… we did not land any major label deals during that trip.

Both of these performances were in some way decisive for us at each point in our career. The first show was actually for a radio segment The Current was doing at the time, where they featured a live performance during the morning rush hour. It put us in good graces with the local authority in alternative radio, and gave us a wider platform to grow. The second show delivered to us the lesson that we were never meant to be a major label band. At least not then. Four chronically unserious friends who truly had no instincts to be marketable and detailed on that level. It was a blessing in disguise that we were laughed out of those rooms, left to find other pathways forward.

Why does this song have staying power? What about this song transcends its own non-release and still has people asking for it years later? Maybe there’s something inherently alluring about a b-side that only fans of a certain level will know. A secret knock that gets you into the backroom of a particular group. Maybe it’s a badge of honor one gains while investigating a band beyond the conventional depth. A token of closeness to something they’re endeared to. Maybe it’s just a good song that people want to listen to. Im unconvinced.

Why this song never came out is a question with many possible answers. One being that we were somewhat reluctant to be too forthcoming with the very first songs that we wrote as a band. We have a saying in this band that you “have to get the bad ones out”, meaning that the first few attempts are destined to be shoddy, unforgiving. Perhaps it was just us deluding ourselves that our first batch of songs was meant to be kept hidden on a shelf, only for nostalgia and indexing purposes. Another possible answer is that the vocal melody at the end of Sula was directly plagiarized from our later song Dollar Bill. Can you really plagiarize your own work? We’ll leave that to the historians to debate, but suffice it to say that we weren’t chomping at the bit to have two songs out with the same melody. A third reason could have been the song itself. It’s bloated with ideas that at times can come off as bluesy- dare I say, ska-like? There is seldom respite from the onslaught of new melodies and parts. In retrospect, I can hear us exploring the territory we sought to occupy as songwriters and perhaps, as we continued writing, some aspects of that terrain felt a bit out of bounds. And one last reason could be that we simply never recorded the song more than the demo we did in whistler’s basement. For one reason or another.. it never wound up on the tracking list of songs we took to the studio. Some newer, younger song stepped in and pulled our focus away from old reliable Sula. To this day, it serves as a forceful addition to a live set, but like a wild stallion, it cannot be tamed and stabled to live on some cold, extended play.

LISTEN TO SULA DEMO: