Rush frontman Geddy Lee has a treat for fans of his 2000 solo album My Favourite Headache. Lee is now streaming The Lost Demos, which is the two previously unreleased songs "Gone" and "I Am… You Are" written and recorded during the My Favourite Headache sessions.
"I'm excited to see these two 'lost demos' released," said Lee. "I loved the songs when they were written and in some ways they feel as fresh and perhaps more relevant all these years later."
Outside Lee, My Favourite Headache featured multi-instrumentalist Ben Mink alongside Soundgarden and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron. My Favourite Headache was produced, engineered, and mixed by David Leonard and mastered by Howie Weinberg.
On the two songs, Lee said in a recent interview with Out Of The Box With Jonathan Clarke (via Blabbermouth) that both were too personal to release at the time.
"During the course of writing the book, my co-writer on My Favourite Headache came across these demos that we had sort of forgotten about. And there are two songs. I talk about them in the book a little bit. One of them is a song called 'Gone' that I had written just after Neil's [Peart] daughter, Selena, had passed away tragically in that car accident. And when you lose somebody, you relive a lot of your other losses. And I was thinking about how does one deal with a sudden disappearance of someone from your life, especially a daughter.
"So I wrote this song with Ben. It was the first song we wrote for My Favourite Headache, and we demoed it, but it just felt — it was beautiful, but I felt it was too raw. It was too close to the bone. I didn't think it was appropriate to release it, out of respect for Neil and the way he was. I didn't feel it was right. So we shelved it. And the other one was a song that we had left sort of incomplete, but most of it had been recorded. It was called 'I Am… You Are', and it was about relationships. And it's about me in the midst of a difficult conversation with my wife, which happened more than once in my life."
"I think the personal nature of that made it also maybe something I wasn't prepared to follow through with, but hearing them last year when I discovered them again, it was, like, 'Wow.' I was amazed how they stood up. So I asked my friend and part-time Rush producer David Bottrill to come in and have a listen to him. And he came over and sat down and, well, he loved them and he loved how raw they were and he loved how honest he thought the vocals were — very different from the other things that are on the album.
"And he just said, 'Leave it with me. Let me play with them and see if I can clean them up,' without changing too much, because he didn't want to lose all the guitars original. My vocals were original. They were done almost 24 years ago. We put new drums on it, and we got a friend of mine to play drums on one song. And then we called Benny up, Ben Mink, 'cause David thought the song really needed a violin solo and Ben is so amazing; he's like the Jeff Beck of the violin. And he just pulled off a corker of a solo.
"Anyway, he mixed them and sent them to me, and I was really shocked. And it really lifted me up and made me remember how much fun it is to make records. And so they're on the [My Effin' Life] audiobook, and they will be released to radio, and I hope people get a kick out of them. I call them the lost demos — 'cause that's what they were, really. I'd forgotten completely about them."
