With the recent Big Cat activity, I've found myself digging through collections of demos left by the wayside. And although I've considered it before, now seems as good a time as any to make these "missing years" demos available.

In brief, these 15 songs were written & recorded in the years between the Big Cats almost breaking up in 1996 to reforming in 2001 [a year after Shannon's passing in May of 2000]. Some odd years in there for sure, but as they've come up on shuffle from time to time, I still hear some things that I enjoy. Hope you do as well.

A little more...

Two time frames are represented here. Songs 1-4 collect ideas from a year I spent in a dumpy apartment in downtown Brooklyn circa 1997. The Big Cats had dispersed and so I headed for the most wildly different scenario from LR that I could find. Living above a nail salon half a block down from the Fulton Street mall fit the bill. I haven't been back to that neighborhood since but for awhile it fulfilled a niche.

The second of these two sets [songs 5-15] were recorded while living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. First in a duplex on the eastern outskirts of town that backed up to a cow pasture and then later in a red house with a large basement halfway up Mount Sequoyah. This would have been around 2000-2001. When the Big Cats decided to reconvene I wrote "Fayetteville Blues" and my bandless, demo days came to a thankful end.

All the best,
BT