As Ross Flournoy tells it, he and his Broken West bandmates were not in the happiest place when they visited us that first week in March. Things weren’t bad, but they were not good either. It had been a rash of bummer days and they needed a pick-me-up, some kind of shot in the arm. It likely could have just been an unexplainable, junky pallor setting over them that needed an exorcism. We offered them a remedy – creative freewill, a dance with an unfamiliar situation and a low-key show at the pizza house downstairs. It was all they needed, believe it or not. They needed us or at least that’s what they’re telling people. They were back on track. We received thank you e-mails days later. They sound on this session to be letting off steam, to be just cutting completely loose. They’re a band that’s taken the good car out and rolled all of the windows down to feel the air kicking past their ears. It makes you want to do the same thing. It feels like a skinny dip. I don’t believe you can plan skinny dips so because this happened, we’ll deem this a privilege that will pass by again in a blue moon. It was a nice long afternoon that spilled into dinner and then the show that we staged with The Silent Years and Death Ships later on was spirited and lighthearted. “Down in the Valley” got a new treatment that Flournoy chuckled through before all got the hang of the unrehearsed new version. When the strings were all pulled tight, it produced more of that magic connection that they might still be riding. I know we are. And when we ran into Flournoy in Austin, over by the pool tables at the SOUND Team show at Buffalo Billiards, he was still beaming. He was drunk too, but mostly beaming. – Sean Moeller

First song
Down in the Valley (The Broken West) [3.82MB] [2031 downloads]


– original version appears on I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
Well, I suppose this is the song people identify most with us. It was originally on the EP we self-released as The Brokedown (_The Dutchman’s Gold_), then when we signed with Merge, we decided we wanted to have more folks, hopefully, get a chance to hear it, so we decided to put it on the LP. This song is about four years old — my friend and ex-bandmate Scott Claassen and I wrote it in a park in Austin, Texas, in February 2003. As soon as we finished it, I went back to the house we were sharing and recorded a demo of it, and the version The Brokedown/The Broken West recorded is virtually identical to that demo. This one’s a lot of fun to play live because it’s upbeat.

Second song
Shiftee (The Broken West) [4.00MB] [1779 downloads]


– original version appears on I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
Another old jam…I wrote the music for this around New Year’s Eve 2002/2003 in at my best friends’ house in the Bel Air neighborhood of LA. I was living in Austin at the time but came to LA for New Year’s to see my buddies, and I was puttering around the house and started playing the finger-picking pattern that starts the song. Once I fleshed out the music, my best friend (and a
very good friend of everyone in The Broken West) Adam Vine penned the lyrics. It’s about two important girls in his life, both of whom had fathers who are opthamologists or optometrists, or eye doctors of some variety.

Third song
So it Goes (The Broken West) [2.78MB] [1818 downloads]


– original version appears on I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
Danny and Adam Vine wrote this song. This was recorded sort of late in the game in the making of the record — maybe the second or third last song we tracked. I remember Danny gave me a demo of the song and I was floored. In some ways, I still feel like his demo is better than the version on the album, but nevertheless, we were all really excited about the song. This is another fun song to play live, especially the pseudo-psychedelic ending.

Fourth song
Hale Sunrise (The Broken West) [5.03MB] [1890 downloads]


– original version appears on I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
To this day, when discussing this song as a band and putting on set lists, we refer to it as “Brooklyn.” Dan wrote the bulk of this song, and it started life as this sort of jagged, almost post-punk jam. It sounded like something that might come out of Williamsburg or some other hip part of NYC, so, without a real title, we started calling it “Brooklyn.” Fun as it was to play in that style, it didn’t really feel like us, so Danny and I radically re-arranged it about a year and a half ago. I came up with the pseudo-R&B bassline, basically trying to do a Shuggie Otis kind of thing. I wrote the lyrics about ten minutes before I recorded the vocal, and I suppose you could call them stream-of-consciousness, though that’s being generous. I still don’t know what the song’s about — I had to record the vocal that night so I just put pen to paper and this is what we got. We actually weren’t going to do this one for our session, but Daytrotter Pat sort of requested it, and I’m glad he did.