When I wrote this song, it was 2007 and I was still in Simon Dawes. I thought I was writing it for our second LP. Blake and I had mostly stopped writing together (with a few exceptions) and would send each other demos of whatever we were working on individually. It’s funny to think we were nearing the end of our time as band mates considering we were both writing much better stuff than anything that made Carnivore, imo. He was showing me tunes like H.O.M.L. and Hiroshima and I was sending over Bedside Manner, Wilderness, Peace in the Valley and Blood and Guts. By the end of our touring days these were all regulars in the set.
I’ve hinted at this before, but my lyric writing during the Carnivore days was pretty sophomoric. When I listen back now I just hear a young faker that needed to figure out how to do his job. Not so with the Blake songs like Salute the Institution and Every Single Time…only with mine. It wasn’t until after that record came out that I really understood the Jonis, Leonards and Dylans. Finding Will Oldham’s writing was also a big moment for me at the time. All of this discovery started to manifest as frustration. Frustration with myself for not being able to communicate a deeper feeling through music, which was all I cared about. So that’s what Blood and Guts was about. I look at it as sort of a challenge to myself to get it together. Structurally, a big inspiration for it was the song Common People by Pulp. The way the tension grows and grows while the lyrics keep flying. You probably wouldn’t have pegged me for a Pulp fan, but they’ve always had my vote for best Britpop band whenever I’ve been asked to weigh in on the debate.
When Simon Dawes became Dawes and I was piecing together what songs I had for our first album, Blood and Guts felt like my ace in the hole. I thought, “If I can’t write anything else good, I at least have that.” But the songs started to amass and the band started to change. We were discovering The Band, CCR, Neil Young, the power of acoustic guitars, B3’s, American Beauty, Highway 61 Revisited…I know that’s not news to anyone who’s listened to even just 10 seconds of North Hills, but it’s worth bringing up as it relates to the kind of song Blood and Guts is. I don’t know if he’d feel differently now, and I hope he doesn’t mind me saying this, but Wylie didn’t particularly like it at the time. He said it felt a little too much like a modern rock song (and not the good kind) next to the rest of the tunes we were playing. We weren’t actively trying to sound retro. But we also had some very strict parameters as to what felt cool at the time. We were in our mid 20’s so being snobs was, to some degree, an obligation. Anyway, Wylie was happy to cut it during the recording session, but our vision of it as some kind of centerpiece was slipping away.
Then we went in to record everything, and at the risk of repeating myself from a previous Substack post, we were there for only 2 weeks. All the recording and all the mixing. Which meant we had to work extremely fast. There was no opportunity to slow down and take stock of the progress we were making. So once we were done recording everything, we started sifting through what we had in order to make the best album we could. We had 14 songs. There was the initial 10 that ended up making the album (When My Time Comes wasn’t recorded yet - as explained in an earlier Substack post) as well as recordings of All My Failures, Don’t Send Me Away, Wilderness and Blood and Guts. I was proud of All My Failures as a song (one of my several attempts at writing a song that sounded like Mickey Newbury) but the recording felt flat. Wilderness was only an acoustic guitar, bass and banjo (played by Jonathan Wilson), so we didn’t want that taking up a slot that could be filled with something that better represented the whole band on a debut album. Don’t Send Me Away didn’t mesh well with the rest of the tunes. And the only thing keeping Blood and Guts from making the album was that we recorded it a little too slow. Simple as that. In other situations, we would’ve had the chance to get back on the floor and recut it. We just didn’t have any more money or time to make that happen. So the decision was made to keep it off the album. At first I was a little freaked out because for so long it had been the flagship for not only the album, but the band as a whole. It was consistently the best song in our live show at our local gigs and probably the oldest of the bunch as well. But as time went on it was clear that it didn’t belong and wouldn’t have fit with what the album had become. It’s wild to think that sometimes that can come down to something as seemingly fixable as tempo.
Listening back now, I kinda like how slow it is. It reminds me of the powerhouse recording of “Drown in My Own Tears” off the album Ray Charles Live. That one is sooo slow and sooo good. I’m also grateful that the song was able to stick around and be available for the Middle Brother album, giving me a chance to share it and maybe even play it live from time to time.
So for all you paid subscribers - here’s that first attempt, recorded in 2008 in Laurel Canyon for North Hills. It’s never been shared until right now.