Lawrence Demos

The Liner Notes

Hey everyone, it’s Clyde. If you’re reading this, thanks for coming to Staycation and buying a disc of our early demos. These are just a small handful of the countless recordings that live exclusively on mine and Gracie’s (and sometimes our parents’ or bandmates’) laptops, but never see the light of day. In a weird way, there’s almost something more vulnerable about releasing these than our official studio recordings. But we get so many questions about our process that we thought it would be a unique way to share some insight with our most devoted fans. And we figured we’d give you a little backstory on what each of these tracks are, so see below for some fun notes!

One quick note: please don’t share these recordings on the internet! We only made 35 copies of each of the two discs, and we’d rather keep this special and exclusive for each of you that chose to grab a copy.

Enjoy!

DISC 1

Almost Grown (2016)

This actually wasn’t the demo for a new song called “Almost Grown” — it was Gracie’s first music project for the intro-level music production class at Brown University (the actual file name for this was “GracieLawrenceFirstProject.mp3”), a class which several of us in the band took! The project’s prompt was to create a brief musical autobiography, and we had recently released our debut album Breakfast, so Gracie included snippets of some bits of Breakfast demos (you can hear “Me & You” pretty prominently, among others), and created a sort of collage layering them over the chords and melody she had recently written for a new song called “Almost Grown.” She sent it to me to add some bass in, and I had recently made the demo for “Friend Or Enemy” (another song that would make it onto Living Room), so I was super into the whole behind-the-beat bass thing, so I added that sort of thing. One really fun bit is that you can clearly hear she used the sound of her dorm room’s door’s swinging, slamming, and knob-twisting for the percussion, which we all loved so much that we ended up using it in the final studio recording as the song builds up in the end. You can listen to that starting at 4:08 in the “drums” stem if you click here.

Do You Wanna (2013)

During my junior year of college, I found myself wandering around campus noticing how fashionably dressed everyone seemed to be, even when they were just going to class. I rarely changed out of sweatpants, even for social events (and even these days, I pretty much change out of them about 5 seconds before you see me walk on stage). At times I felt insecure about whether it was weird that my ideal “night out” and ways of presenting myself seemed to sometimes be different than other people’s. I had also been thinking a lot about how the genre of pop, r&b, and funk was so filled with sweeping generalities about the idea of love and romance, but without much specificity, and almost never in the more conversational tone that I had come to love in the lyrics of artists like Randy Newman, Ben Folds, or Fountains of Wayne. Those two things came together when I had the vision of a breakbeat-driven funk/soul song doing a James Brown break, but instead of the lead singer saying something like “hey baby, let me take you on an adventure,” I’d say “I’ll put on my finest sweatpants and I’ll order you pad Thai.” I raced home and wrote the entire song that day, and put together this recording that night and sent it around to the band and my family. We played it at our show a few days later and it immediately became our most popular song around campus.

For the musicians, you may notice this original demo is in C. We changed it to B because even though my voice felt good singing this in C on a good day, we almost always closed our shows with this, and my voice was never up to the challenge by the end of the night!

Hotel TV (2019)

Gracie has an awesome way of making demos, where she just sings into the mic on her earbuds and layers tons of vocals, and then uses these bedroom-y stock Logic sounds, which always leads to these very lo-fi sounding demos, that often have such character that we pull production elements from them into the final project.

This song in particular is one of the first songs we co-wrote with Jon Bellion. Usually Gracie or I would write our songs just the two of us and then bring mostly (or fully) finished songs to Jonny, Jordan and the rest of the band. But for this one, Gracie showed me, Jonny and Jordan this demo and we all loved it but we weren’t sure exactly where to take it. We knew we loved the “I got a Hotel TV” hook, and we knew we’d be getting together with Jon for another session a few days later, so we decided to hold off on trying to actually flesh out the song until we were with him. Sure enough, Gracie, Jordan, Jonny and I got together with Jon and dove into it, changing the chord pattern and rewriting just about everything other than that one line, but the genesis of it is certainly in this demo!

If I Could Dream (2004)

This is one of many songs I wrote as a kid that never got released. Many of them, including this one have lots of elements that I’m really proud of — some of them even include bits and pieces that I repurposed for Lawrence songs down the line, and a few of them might even make it onto an official Lawrence album one day (probably with some songwriting tweaks here and there). The writing and recording of these childhood demos are some of my favorite memories, and a really amazing time when I could just spend hours experimenting and learning (other than some awesome harmonica contributions from my dad, I produced and performed every element of this myself) without any particular plans of how to release it, or any larger artist project for it to fit into. I chose to include this one because it felt like one that you can definitely hear the beginnings of the “Lawrence” sound poking through in some places, even down to the subject matter of insomnia, which we later re-used as the topic for “Probably Up”.

Where It Started From (2014)

I remember really diving into D’Angelo’s album Voodoo during my junior year of college and having it totally blow my mind. I had listened to a few tracks here and there, but something about listening top to bottom to that album on good speakers as a college student (while going through a pretty brutal breakup, I might add) is a very special experience. I was immediately so inspired by it and I remember just playing guitar to “Send It On” over and over in my room. One time I accidentally hit a wrong chord (the flat-3-major-7, which plays a very key role in “Where It Started From”) and I was like “whoa that’s cool.” Kind of a cool learning lesson to always try to make “accidents” when you’re just playing aimlessly, because sometimes they’re awesome. Anyway, “Where It Started From” flowed pretty naturally from there.

This one also felt fun to include because it was made during my senior year of college, when my production skills really started to improve significantly. You can tell that this one is a lot closer sonically to the final product than any of the demos I had made previously. Shout-out to Peter Enriquez who played guitar on this demo — lots of this “demo” playing actually ended up in the studio recording because we liked it so much.

One other fun tidbit is that the epic outro that is on the studio recording isn’t in this demo! I hadn’t originally actually written that part, it was something that I later wrote as an outro just for the live version (we often add epic extensions of our songs for the live versions, more recent examples include “Freckles” and “Jet Lag”), but we had toured it enough by the time we recorded it that we knew we had to include it on the final studio version.

DISC 2

I’ll Follow You (2004)

This is another one of my childhood demos (see above some background on these childhood demos in my explanation of “If I Could Dream”)! I mentioned this in the Q+A at Staycation, but I like writing songs from sort of alternate perspectives that I’m not currently experiencing, like past or future versions of myself. Much like “So Damn Fast,” this is a song I wrote from the perspective of a student who is graduating well before actually graduating myself (in this case, I’m referring to middle school graduation haha!). I think I had been listening to a lot of early Stevie Wonder at the time and this was sort of my attempt at an “Isn’t She Lovely” type of song. It was also one of the first songs that I asked Gracie to sing some featured background vocals on, which she sounds so insanely good doing (I think she was literally 6 at the time?). I always find this song funny because I’m singing “nostalgically” about the “old days,” but I was like 10 at the time. It’s all relative I guess!

I’m Confident (That I’m Insecure) (2021)

This is an unreleased Lawrence song that will almost certainly be on our next album! You’ve also likely heard it, since we posted snippets on TikTok, performed it live at many of our pre-show VIP events, and even debuted it live at Staycation and a few shows leading up to it.

This is the demo that Gracie made, but we already have a in-progress studio version in the works. So far, the main vocal riff from this original demo is in the final product. Otherwise, we’ve re-done everything, but kept the same general spirit (although it is a bit faster than this demo, and there’s now of course more of the song after the 2nd hook). One fun tidbit is that we’ve decided to change the first lyric from “fuck” to “shucks.” Something about “shucks” seemed funnier and more unique.

Do us a favor and don’t fall too in love with this version, otherwise you’ll succumb to the well-known affliction called demo-itis and you won’t like it when we put out the actual studio version!

Make A Move (2016)

I really love this demo for “Make A Move” — I think it really captures not only the songwriting elements that are core to the song, but also the sonic direction. We really stayed true to the “vibe” of this recording between the vocal approach, the very minimalist backing track, the sort of non-drum-set percussion groove. Also the way she does the sound right before the “make a move,” how it has almost a reverse reverb type of thing, that was a cool idea for that moment that we definitely replicated for the final version. Overall, this song was definitely one of the most challenging to finish, because Gracie had established such a cool sound for it that we wanted to pursue, and it was a sound that we weren’t as used to making.

Too Easy (Fast Option) (2013)

This is one of the funniest files I have in the vault! I wrote “Too Easy” in one really crappy night as a relationship of mine was unraveling. The lyrics are angry and resentful (and include lots of little references to personal things from that relationship that likely only I (and she, maybe?) will ever enjoy), but that night I think I was just in the mood to write something a little more upbeat, probably to pick myself up emotionally. I was on a huge Badfinger and Ben Folds kick at the time so that’s sort of where my head was at. I actually taught the song to the band and we performed it maybe twice in this style. A few months later, we were at Sumner’s family home in Vermont after a show at Dartmouth College, and I was feeling particularly wistful and gloomy about what had by that point become a full-blown breakup. It was 3am and I had probably had a few drinks, and I just sat down at his piano and played the song in the style that we eventually recorded it. I think in a lot of ways, I probably wasn’t emotionally ready on the night that I wrote that song to consider that this was the best version of the song, one that is much more vulnerable and defeated. I wanted to write a song about a fight, but I didn’t realize until later I was writing a song about a breakup.

One fun tidbit is that there is a background vocal group that sings a cool countermelody from 2:00-2:08 which didn’t end up making the track. The lyrics they’re singing are “funny how nobody sings about oranges.”

Wash Away (2008)

This is a demo that will always be very special to me because I think it is oldest demo I have of a song that actually made it in full onto an official Lawrence release. I wrote this song when I was 14, during a time when I was writing tons of songs of all different styles, from more epic rock to indie singer-songwriter to showtunes-y (all of which poke through probably to some degree in our music now, but not with as much variation as it did then). This was fully my attempt at a Motown-esque song, like a “Hey Love” by Stevie Wonder or “The Way You Do The Things You Do,” even down to the somewhat generic love lyrics that I wrote to emulate those (I was certainly not drawing off of any personal experiences). I remember being happy with how it came out and thinking that I’d like to make more music like this, so in a lot of ways, I think this demo was a bit of a pre-cursor of the Lawrence sound. In college, we sped it up a bit so that it would play well to the basement party audiences, and it became one of our go-to songs, so we included it on our first album Breakfast. Major hat tip to Jordan, who I believe came up with the way the studio version does its chorus tags at the end, which differs from this original demo.