There gets to be a point in every songwriter’s life where they wonder, “What the fuck am I gonna do with all these songs?

After ten or fifteen or twenty years, anyone who has made a practice of writing and recording music will end up with a clutch of songs that, for one reason or another, didn’t fit with their main project and got cast aside. 

Sometimes the songs don’t fit the style of the main act. From Part Time Ghost, to Heck Reckoners, to Thic Masc, my bands have narrowed rather than expanded the type of music we play. Where loud, metallic, garage punk was a fixture of Part Time Ghost, now it’s practically the only thing we do in Thic Masc. 

Here’s a pro tip for getting a band off the ground: you’ll go faster and farther if you pick a lane. Artists understandably want to try everything, but a band benefits from constraints. Pick a genre; pick a collection of sounds; pick a singer, a guitarist, a drummer, a bassist; pick a band leader. 

Nothing drags that sussing out period longer than wishy-washy direction.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with a group who swap instruments, demo a range of material, or play with a bunch of different effects, but they’ve got to be honest about what they’re doing. They’re not practicing in a band. They’re jamming. 

And, again, there’s nothing wrong with jamming. I imagine the majority of people who play music get together every couple of weeks drink some beers, burn some js, and rock out nine-minute covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival songs. Ain’t nothing wrong with that…unless you’ve got expectations to do more than jam. 

But let’s say you’re writing for a well-led, self-editing band. Inspiration, that ever fickle beast that fuels creativity, won’t only arrive for the ultra specific microgenre of music that your main band creates. It splashes over everything. And if you follow it to its logical conclusion (which you should almost always do when inspired), you’ll end up with songs that might not work for your band. 

And that’s how, over the years, I’ve accumulated a bunch of folky indie rock songs that wouldn’t really sound good for any of the bands that I’ve played with. 

There’s also another reason that a song may be wrong for a band: they reject it. This usually isn’t stated outright (though it can be), but on occasion, I have introduced a song to a band only to have the other members no sell me on it. 

Sometimes they rightfully conclude that I shouldn’t have brought the song to them in the first place because it’s actually outside of the band’s wheelhouse. 

In the blush of creation, I know I’ve gotten zealous about shoving songs down my band’s throat that aren’t right for them. I really just want the boys to pat me on the head and tell me I did a good job, even though, “No, Zac, your eleven-minute trip-hop ballad isn’t going to work for Thic Masc.”   

Sometimes, a band doesn’t like a song because the members don’t like their part on it. The drummer finds it too slow. The singer doesn’t like the lyrics. The bassist doesn’t like the five minute drone section where they only get to play one note. I’ve learned that you can only make people do things they don’t like for a short period of time. And you should only force them to do it sparingly or they’ll tell you to fuck off…. Or, you can employ a cheat code: you can pay them. 

(For the record, just like children, band members sometimes don’t know what’s good for them. Nic fought against Part Time Ghost playing “Leone 1991 — Lumumba 1960” because it’s long, has multiple parts, and feels repetitive until it is not. Early attempts at it were a mess. But once the band got the song under its fingers, it became his favorite. For the last year of PTG, we used it as our closer.) 

Sometimes, the band doesn’t like a song because they think it sucks. 

But sometimes your band is fucking stupid. 

If I seem salty about this, it’s because I’ve never brought a song to a band that I thought was less than good. And wherever I’ve had a song categorically rejected, I always felt that maybe the band were right, that that song actually did fucking suck. And then, in my mind, that song develops a stank. I don’t revisit it. I don’t try to play it again. I don’t even strip it for parts to rewrite into another song that doesn’t “suck.” I just let it rot on my hard drive as a reminder that when you shoot a lot of shots, you’re gonna miss a lot of shots. 

Well, I went back to some of those sucky rejects this week only to learn that my bands were wrong and that I was right. The songs were fine; they just weren’t fine for the bands. Ultimately, that’s cool. I’ll find another place for them. 

Which is what I’m working on now. 

Typically, I guess, this would be considered a solo project, except that I’m not well-rounded enough to go at it alone, and I don’t think my voice sounds right for most of this material. 

(Oh, yeah, that’s a big one. Every band’s singer is hemmed in by their range and persona. And you don’t want your singer singing a song that’s not right for them. You don’t want Sabrina Carpenter singing Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones” any more than you want me singing Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”…or Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones.”)

So in honor of “solo” projects and the songs that fall between the couch cushions, I’m picking Thom Yorke’s The Eraser as this week’s Heck Record. 

Typically, most musicians create solo albums after either their band collapses (the Beatles, Lou Reed, Frank Black, etc.) or during a period of instability (Keith Richards, Mick Jagger), but some musicians (like Yorke, the members of the Grateful Dead, and Gwen Stefani) have fulfilling solo careers and/or side projects alongside their main meal tickets. 

Yorke may have the most side projects of all. He’s made Radiohead-esque rock with The Smile, downbeat funk with Flea in Atoms for Peace, soundtracks, a collaborative ambient album with Mark Pritchard, and three solo studio albums as himself. The best of the solos is probably ANIMA, but the most important for his career is certainly The Eraser.   

Yorke has admitted that getting Radiohead up and moving is a gargantuan task (they haven’t released an album since 2016) that’s freighted with expectations, and that as a relentlessly creative guy, he needs an outlet to release stuff, even if it’s ten percent less good that what Radiohead could come up with. Amen, dude. Keep the slop coming. 

I hope to have some “solo” or side project slop of my own to share in the future.