Roughs From 2nd LP
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. 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, but the band held off from mixing it right away.[1] A new drum machine, the Alesis HR-16, was releasing later in the year and they wanted to use it on the album.[2] 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 were to appear on Lincoln. These early versions share much in common with their final iterations, though they include some noteworthy differences. All songs feature alternate instruments, effects or arrangements. All vocal tracks are identical to the final songs, with the exception of "Ana Ng," which features an alternate lead vocal take. The tracks notably use Yamaha RX11 and RX15 drum machines, the same machines that the band used on their debut album. These distinctly brash-sounding machines played the original drum parts, which were later replaced with the advanced Alesis HR-16 machine.
Side B of the tape is comprised of some mysterious material that has no relation to They Might Be Giants. It includes one unknown pop song, and two edited recordings of unidentified vocalists. There was no writing on the tape to indicate the identities of the artists, and there are no known traces of these songs on the internet.
The tape exists in the University of Calgary's EMI Music Canada Archive collection. Lincoln was distributed in Canada by Enigma Records, which became a subsidiary of EMI in 1989. It can be assumed that the tape was sent to Enigma as a preview of the band's upcoming album. The EMI Music Canada Archive also includes two items that might have been paired with the tape: a cassette copy of the band's debut album, as well as a VHS tape of one of the band's appearances on Nickelodeon's Nick Rocks.
These rough mixes have not been officially released, and were not intended to be heard by the public. Bill Krauss, producer of Lincoln, commented on the tape: "Unlike the demos, 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. One of us must have loaned this copy to someone and never got it back."[3]
Track listing
| # | Title | Length | Lyrics | Guitar Tab |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ana Ng (Rough Mix) | 3:00
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N/A |
| 2 | Snowball In Hell (Rough Mix) | 2:31
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N/A |
| 3 | They'll Need A Crane (Rough Mix) | 2:33
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N/A |
| 4 | Shoehorn With Teeth (Rough Mix) | 1:10
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N/A |
| 5 | The World's Address (Rough Mix) | 2:20
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N/A |
| 6 | Cage & Aquarium (Rough Mix) | 1:08
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N/A |
