Roughs From 2nd LP

Cassette

Roughs From 2nd LP, 5/88 is an officially unreleased cassette tape that contains rough mixes of songs from They Might Be Giants' second album Lincoln. Housed in the digital collections of the University of Calgary in Canada^[1], these recordings are unique to this tape and have not appeared elsewhere.

Background

The Lincoln album was recorded in early 1988, at Al Houghton's Dubway Studios in Manhattan. The main recording sessions concluded in May,^[2] but the band held off from mixing it right away. A new drum machine, the Alesis HR-16, was releasing later in the year and they wanted to use it on the album.^[3] They halted production until they obtained the new machine, at which point they mixed and finalized the album at Dubway. This cassette tape of early mixes dates to May 1988, in the period after the initial album recording sessions, and before it was mixed.

Side A of the tape includes six They Might Be Giants tracks, all of which are rough early mixes of songs that would appear on Lincoln. All of these tracks have elements in common with their final versions, though they feature some significant differences. All tracks have radically different mixes, and many have alternate instruments and arrangements. All the vocal tracks are identical to the final songs, with the exception of "Ana Ng," which features an alternate (fairly rough) lead vocal. These recordings also use Yamaha RX11 and RX15 drum machines, which the band used heavily on their debut album. All the Yamaha drum tracks were later replaced by the newer Alesis HR-16 drum machine.

Side B of the tape is comprised of some mysterious material that was not created by They Might Be Giants — one unknown pop song, as well as some edited recordings of unidentified vocalists. There are no traces of these songs on the internet, and there's nothing on the tape to indicate the identities of the artists.

There isn't much information on the tape to indicate its history or intended purpose, although it can be assumed the tape was originally meant for the band only, as stated by the band's producer, Bill Krauss^[4]:

Unlike the demo [tapes], rough mixes were never meant for any kind of distribution outside the core group. They were for us to listen to the work in progress and help us decide what it needed.

As the tape is housed in an archived collection of recordings from EMI Music Canada^[5], it can be assumed that the tape was potentially passed down to a representative of Enigma Records as a sampler in an agreement to distribute Lincoln in Canada^[6], as Enigma later became a subsidiary of EMI^[7]. It is also possible that the tape and potentially others were created as samples of the band's upcoming work, and were shared exclusively with other American or international record companies.

Track listing

#	Title	Length	Lyrics	Guitar Tab
1	Ana Ng (Rough Mix)	3:00		N/A
2	Snowball In Hell (Rough Mix)	2:31		N/A
3	They'll Need A Crane (Rough Mix)	2:33		N/A
4	Shoehorn With Teeth (Rough Mix)	1:10		N/A
5	The World's Address (Rough Mix)	2:20		N/A
6	Cage & Aquarium (Rough Mix)	1:08		N/A