Elegy-The Latest Townedgers Compilation Album

 The Songs:

The End (The Doors)  9:33

Fool For Your Glasses (R.Smith)  3:38

Molly's Folly (R.Smith/K.Miller) 6:24

Saving Grace (R.Smith, G.Redding)  3:15

I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song (J.Croce)  2:46

Jimmy Brown The Newsboy (M.Wiseman)  2:05

Drawn In The Dark (R.Smith/G.Redding) 4:07

Walk In Solitude (R.Smith) 3:25

Six Days On The Road (D.Dudley) 3:25

Slippin' Away (Bill Anderson)  2:45

Ain't No Grave (Trad; Arr by The Townedgers)  5:34

Rodney Smith-Lead Vocals, Rhythm Lead Guitar, Drums

Geoff Redding-Guitar, Backing Vocals

Robby Knowles-Bass, Backing Vocals 9-11

Martin Daniels-Bass 1-7

Compiled By R.Smith.

Produced By Terry Bainbridge and Rodney Smith

1.3,4 Produced By Rodney Smith And Richard Dennenbaugh

A+R: Diggy Kat 

Notes:

With the completion of the new Townedger album, our record company asked if there enough material left in the vaults.  Usually the line of thinking when I did Logic And Lies, we had a bunch of covers left to make another (which lead to Eminent Domain) to satisfy our fans (all three of them).  But 2020 has been a crappy year.  We started work on the new album right before the COVID outbreak and after a couple week, I got lazy and then in August, Mother Nature gave us a Shitstorm that changed the landscape around the area.   In the meantime, I was gigging with Blues Rox and helping The Boy Scout Hippies and Julie at various open mics around the area,   And The Towndgers got stuck on the back burner.   8 months later, the album finally got done and mixed and ready to continue the musical journey. 

While going through the archives, I found that what was left behind, most were tossed off ideas or demos for consideration.  Walk In Solitude, done for the 2020 album was a quick idea that I never followed through.   I added drums later for inclusion for something like this.  Jimmy Brown was the basis for The Way Life Used To Be for Logic And Lies, but I didn't think it fit even for Eminent Domain, the odds and ends record after Logic And Lies.  The Jim Croce number is a sweet little love song that I could never come with myself,  so I recorded it and then forgot all about it.    The End, is the original version that was on No Exit (later dropped when No Exit was replaced by Thirty) and even with the Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mine part,  I get a kick of revisiting this part.    And get the play the Dminor strum for 9 and half minutes  

Fool From Your Glasses is from Jubilee and was left off that album due to length of the CD.  We could have added it but there's a part on there that my vocals got erased.  Listening to this version of Drawn In The Dark is much more harder edge and probably could have been used for Logic And Lies but we thought the lead vocal was lost forever due to a poor recording tape.  However, Terry Bainbridge found it and compressed it back to at least you can hear it.   The last three songs are from the 2020 sessions that didn't make it to that album.  We didn't see the need for another Six Days On The Road and Slipping Away was left off due to the fact we didn't want the new album to be an hour long.  Perhaps in hindsight we should have left Jeannette (the final act) and Just To Satisfy You as well, but they were requested by our A and R guy.  Who usually knows best.

Ain't No Grave, like Walk In Solitude, was a rough draft.  I hear this from an old Gospel CD that I found up in Madison and wanted to explore using that song but our version is night n day.   I threw the drums on one take and it's rough but then again we always do things rough.  The Townedger way.

Molly's Folly and Saving Grace are from a 2007 live recording date.  The latter, originally done on 1989's Moonlight Chronicles, is cleaned up and somewhat true to the original, except for the sloppy ending, we did another version on a cancelled odds and sods CD with Fade out but in 1989, Geoff and I had plenty of ideas.  Saving Grace here was sped up and was faded at the end.    Not one of my proudest moments but it does rock.

Going through archives, there was some songs I was trying to look for but couldn't find them.  The 2004 Garth Richardson produced Long Time Forgotten that had Rolling And Tumbling which found its way on a TE best of that got withdrawn.   The tapes to the 20 album have disappeared as well.  Most of the Pawnshops For Olivia outtakes found themselves on Townedger Country in 2009, As for the No Exit outtakes, I only could tolerate The End and the tapes  used to record were shit.  Forthcoming Trains had two versions of It Was Nice That It Lasted but neither one really floated my boat, the second version had a cool middle part where Martin Daniels' bass line led the song but otherwise we felt that song was boring.  For Logic And Lies, only Drawn In The Dark first version was used, we had a bootleg recording of Teri with Jeff Overly on soprano sax but the vocals are muffled (it was a cell phone recording from Belinda James, who at that time was my vocalist in The Egads!) and a partial of Gold Dust Woman with Julie Gordon singing, another Belinda James recording where she was singing backing vocals.  There was a Who Do You Love Jam, where we were just messing around.  Fitting Finales had Bring It On Home and a alternative version of I Know About Me and Fitting Finales but I wasn't happy with the way the drums sounded and by the time we got done with Ain't No Grave, we were at the 47 minute mark and called it a day.  Loverman, an outtake from 2020 was simply too silly with the words.   

Elegy sums up the majority of this decade, tho Molly's Folly and Saving Grace was from the late 00's.  We were quite rusty from the five year layoff between Pawnshops For Olivia and No Exit/Thirty but it was Forthcoming Trains that opened the door the return to the CR music scene and left the Townedgers on the back burner, except for the occasional albums that came out afterward.  Who knows what would have happened had I applied myself earlier (like about 1984) then later.  If I'm still living twenty years from now, Elegy will be the 2010's answer to Observations From The Forefront, outtakes that actually got better with age.  I doubt the whole world will be listening, but as long as I have  a decent copy, I'll return to the scene of the crime to hear what the fuss was all about.  

R.S.

11/20/2020