Author: Jernej Vene
Artist: Winger
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2007
The new millennium brought a new way of consuming music. We’re talking about new technologies that make it possible to distribute and play it. No artist is safe from uncontrolled file sharing over the internet. Kip Winger, the band’s frontman, decided to gather the recordings in one place and make them available to fans. He won’t get rich from it; he simply decided to put the full stop on a particular era of the band. Winger were, and still are, huge music lovers. The desire to break through among the big names was enormous at the start, and even though the guys already had experience playing with bigger names, launching an independent career was hard graft.
Demo Anthology shows the level of work of a band that wants to get noticed, American-style of course. As we know, the USA is far from the promised land, but the music industry there is highly developed and a big help to musicians. In the mid-eighties Winger got together and recorded a ton of material for each of their three albums. Kip Winger explains that he scraped through every drawer and gathered enough songs for two records. These days he no longer makes demos, because he believes it’s better to record songs as they are, without excessive polishing or redoing. With rock songs you have to catch the magic of the moment, the thrill that comes with the birth of every song. In the eighties there weren’t recording options like today for capturing musical ideas in decent quality, so they had to replay the ideas in the studio. The demo versions of the songs on this double collection are pretty raw and sonically unfinished. That’s exactly what gives them a fresh look, or rather creates a different message from the originals. Winger wrote all the songs for their debut Winger (1988) in six months, while the songs for the second album In the heart of the young were written in a rented house in California. The stories behind some of the songs are really interesting too. Keyboardist Paul Taylor, for example, wrote their well-known ballad Miles away from the second album years earlier, even before the first album. The work on the third album Pull (1993) was similar to before, with Winger and guitarist Reb Beach sitting down with their instruments next to a drum machine and playing and playing…Winger had writer’s block with the lyrics at the time. To break it and finish the songs for the album, he rented a car and drove from New York to Miami, then to Santa Fe and back to New York. During that time, after six thousand miles, he had all the lyrics on paper. This collection has every single song Winger recorded during the era of their first three albums. Across their output, Winger showed the unshakable power of their musical expression, the songwriting ability of Kip Winger and Reb Beach in particular, and the flawless instrumental performance of the whole band, with keyboardist Paučl Taylor and drummer Rod Morgenstein also leaving a strong mark. The sound quality is also surprisingly good, even though these are demos, meaning work-in-progress recordings. Demo Anthology is especially interesting because it includes as many as ten unreleased songs that never appeared on any of the albums.
Lineup
Reb Beach – guitars, vocals
Kip Winger – vocals, bass
Paul Taylor – keyboards, vocals
Rod Morgenstein – drums
Track list
CD1.
1. Madalaine
2. Hungry
3. Seventeen
4. State Of Emergency
5. Time To Surrender
6. Hangin’ On
7. Headed For A Heartbreak
8. Only Love (*)
9. Can’t Get Enough
10. Loosen Up
11. Easy Come Easy Go
12. Rainbow In The Rose
13. In The Day We’ll Never See
14. Under One Condition
15. Little Dirty Blonde
16. Star Tripper (*)
17. You Are The Saint I Am The Sinner
18. In The Heart of The Young
CD2.
1. All I Ever Wanted (*)
2. Skin Tight (*)
3. Never (*)
4. Someday Someway (*)
5. Blind Revolution Mad
6. Down Incognito
7. Spell I’m Under
8. Hour Of Need
9. Junkyard Dog
10. The Lucky One
11. In For The Kill
12. No Man’s Land
13. Like A Ritual
14. Who’s The One
15. Written In The Wind (*)
16. Until There Was You (*)
17. Without Warning (*)
18. Give Me More (*)
*….. an asterisk marks songs that never appeared on the band’s albums
